Enhancing resilience: Understanding the impact of flood hazard and vulnerability on business interruption and losses

Without taking additional measures, flooding is becoming more likely and intense in a changing climate, which causes large economic damage. Households and firms are directly impacted by physical flood damage, but further ripple effects on society occur through business disruptions. By using post-disaster survey data from the 2021 flood event in...

Advancing participatory backcasting for climate change adaptation planning using 10 cases from 3 continents

In the face of climate change, a major challenge is to inform and guide long-term climate change adaptation planning under deep uncertainty, while aiming at transformative change. Normative futures studies approaches, such as participatory backcasting, visioning and transition management, are increasingly applied, but their potential for climate...

On anammox activity at low temperature: Effect of ladderane composition and process conditions

The application of partial nitritation-anammox (PN/A) under mainstream conditions can enable substantial cost savings at wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), but how process conditions and cell physiology affect anammox performance at psychrophilic temperatures below 15 °C remains poorly understood. We tested 14 anammox communities, including...

How natural processes contribute to flood protection: A sustainable adaptation scheme for a wide green dike

Effective adaptation to sea-level rise is critical for future flood protection. Nature-based solutions including salt marshes have been proposed to naturally enhance coastal infrastructure. A gently sloping grass-covered dike (i.e. Wide Green Dike) can be strengthened with clay accumulating locally in the salt marsh. This study explores the...

The sensitivity of a dike-marsh system to sea-level rise-a model-based exploration

Integrating natural components in flood defence infrastructure can add resilience to sea-level rise. Natural foreshores can keep pace with sea-level rise by accumulating sediment and attenuate waves before reaching the adjacent flood defences. In this study we address how natural foreshores affect the future need for dike heightening. A...

Back to the future: Viewing a 1992 flood risk study through a 2017 lens

Here we examine whether a study conducted 25 years ago (1992) would have had different conclusions if concepts and analytical methods developed since then had been used. The 1992 problem was to identify a strategy for reducing flood risk in the Netherlands by, for example, strengthening the river dikes against the risk of flooding. Since then,...

Coastal defence cost estimates: Case study of the Netherlands, New Orleans and Vietnam

This study is part of a global study on the costs of adaptation to the effects of climate change. It adds information from three specific case studies (the Netherland, New Orleans and Vietnam) to the global study. The case study areas are comparable by type of coast; all are low-lying deltaic coastal areas. This study investigates the unit cost...