The climate barge: Heritage and climate adaptation in the Dutch province of South-Holland

In the project Heritage uncovered; Tow barge canals in a water management context, the future value of tow barge canals for climate adaptation has been studied. The project focused on the area between the cities Leiden, The Hague, Delft, Rotterdam and Gouda, with a surface area of km2, and the tow barge canals the Vliet, the Schie, the Gouwe and...

On the rocks- a breakable heaven: A new water system and way of living for the Guadarrama mountains, in Spain.

The Guadarrama mountains are a mountain range crisscrossing the Spanish highlands, dividing the historic region of Castile in two and separating the wealthy, but rampantly overbuilt region of Madrid from the rural and undeveloped Castile-and-Leon. This project explores the possibility of addressing the three main current challenges in the area ...

Changing Minds: Towards Water-Based Architecture and Public Space for the Future Urban Archipelago

This blog contribution supports the Urban Archipelago expo at Nieuwe Instituut (NI) in Rotterdam, designed to consist of four elements: a map, a view, a model, and a series of films that depicted a future of living with water, as well as a booklet that documented student work. The expo has been part of the Water Cities Rotterdam, which opened...

Groundwater Vulnerability in a Megacity Under Climate and Economic Changes: A Coupled Sociohydrological Analysis

Groundwater depletion has become increasingly challenging, and many cities worldwide have adopted drastic policies to relieve water stress due to socioeconomic growth. Located on the declining aquifer of the North China Plain, Beijing, for example, has developed plans to limit the size of the city’s population. However, the effect of...

Raising Waters: A circular water-based vision for an adaptive future of South-Holland

The Netherlands, and in particular South–Holland, is to a large extent below sea level, making the region vulnerable to environmental challenges linked to climate change. According to IPCC, a sea-level rise of two to five metres is not excluded, while the Delta committee advised the government recently to not invest in new infrastructure in the...

Relocating Rotterdam: The task of spatial planning and urban design throughout scales in the context of extreme flood risk scenarios in the Netherlands

The current notion of risk used in the Netherlands has a strong focus on reducing the probability that flooding occurs. It leaves little attention for reducing exposure and vulnerability, as the other components when defining risk. Socio-economic trends show that the areas below sea level will be only more densely inhabited with people and will...

Turning off the Tap: A climate resilient spatial solution for fluvial flooding in the United Kingdom

The main goal of this project is to develop a sustainable method to mitigate flooding of the non-tidal rivers in the United Kingdom which can be used by all stakeholders within the climate scenario of 2050. <br/>The focus on non-tidal rivers will mean the focus of flooding will be mainly on fluvial flooding, while pluvial flooding will be a...

Resilient by design: a modelling approach to support scenario and policy analysis in the Olifants River Basin, South Africa

In this paper, we report on a concerted modelling effort in the South African water resources sector in which system dynamics provides the paradigmatic framing for both a stakeholder engagement process and for developing an underpinning, integrative simulation model. We describe the design of the parallel modelling approach and examine the...

Fit for purpose? Building and evaluating a fast, integrated model for exploring water policy pathways

Exploring adaptation pathways is an emerging approach for supporting decision making under uncertain changing conditions. An adaptation pathway is a sequence of policy actions to reach specified objectives. To develop adaptation pathways, interactions between environment and policy response need to be analysed over time for an ensemble of...

City Blueprints: 24 Indicators to Assess the Sustainability of the Urban Water Cycle

Climate change, population growth and increased consumption, coupled with urbanization, are all placing increased pressure on water management. This global challenge can often best be addressed at the local level, e.g. in cities by optimizing the role of civil society. Although there are approaches for assessing the sustainability of countries...

A different approach to water: Water management policy in the 21st century

This document outlines the Cabinet's position on water management policy in the 21st century. Immediately fuelling this is my concern about increasing water levels in the rivers, flooding, and the accelerated rise in sea level. In a country like the Netherlands, the geography of which is dominated by the sea and the mouths of four great rivers,...