Belief-Informed Robust Decision Making (BIRDM): Assessing changes in decision robustness due to changing distributions of deep uncertainties

Robust Decision Making (RDM) is an established framework for decision making under deep uncertainty. RDM relies on the idea of scenario neutrality, namely that decision robustness is not affected by how scenarios are generated if these are uniformly distributed and span a sufficiently large range of future states of the world. Several authors...

Tailored flood risk management: Accounting for socio-economic and cultural differences when designing strategies

Climate change and socio-economic development result in increasing flood risk which challenges flood risk management policy making and practice. Each situation, however, is different and calls for not only understanding the natural context, but also the socio-economic and cultural context. Only then Flood Risk Management strategies can be...

Efficient or Fair? Operationalizing Ethical Principles in Flood Risk Management: A Case Study on the Dutch-German Rhine

Flood risk management decisions in many countries are based on decision-support frameworks which rely on cost-benefit analyses. Such frameworks are seldom informative about the geographical distribution of risk, raising questions on the fairness of the proposed policies. In the present work, we propose a new decision criterion that accounts...

Systemic flood risk management: The challenge of accounting for hydraulic interactions

Rivers typically flow through multiple flood-protected areas which are clearly interconnected, as risk reduction measures taken at one area, e.g. heightening dikes or building flood storage areas, affect risk elsewhere. We call these interconnections 'hydraulic interactions'. The current approach to flood risk management, however, neglects...

A framework to assess integration in flood risk management: Implications for governance, policy, and practice

Over decades the concept of integration has been promoted to enhance alignment between policy domains, and to manage trade-offs and maximize synergies across management practices. Integrated approaches have the potential to enable better outcomes for flood risk management (FRM) and society as a whole. However, achieving integration in...

Accounting for the uncertain effects of hydraulic interactions in optimising embankments heights: Proof of principle for the IJssel River

Most alluvial plains in the world are protected by flood defences, for example, embankments, whose primary aim is to reduce the probability of flooding of the protected areas. At the same time, however, the presence of embankments at one area influences hydraulic conditions of downstream areas located on the same river. These hydraulic...

Room for Rivers: Risk Reduction by Enhancing the Flood Conveyance Capacity of The Netherlands’ Large Rivers

The Netherlands has just finished implementing the Room for the Rivers program along the Rhine and Meuse Rivers in response to increasing river discharges. Recently, making more room for the river is, however, being challenged for future application because the flood defenses are assessed to be too weak and will need reinforcement anyway. To be...

Robust river systems: on assessing the sensitivity of embanked rivers to discharge uncertainties, exemplified for the Netherlands' main rivers

There is increasing attention for the robustness of systems, in view of more frequent and more extreme weather events. Calls to increase a system's robustness are usually motivated by the resulting reduced sensitivity to extreme events and uncertainties about their probability of occurrence. The concept has been elaborated for flood risk systems...

Towards climate-change proof flood risk management

Especially in low-lying deltaic areas, a sound adaptation policy is urgently needed, because relying on a global mitigation policy for climate change is way too risky. Both the Netherlands’ policy response and our research therefore focus on adaptation. In the Netherlands, climate change is given due attention for about two decades already,...

Flood risk assessment and flood risk management; An introduction and guidance based on experiences and findings of FLOODsite (an EU-funded Integrated project)

FLOODsite, from the start, had the ambition to provide conceptual and methodological guidance on how to analyze and assess flood risks as well as on how to manage flood risk and flood events. The main goal of this volume is to share FLOODsite’s view on what a comprehensive approach to flood risk assessment and management is, and what it ought to...

Text-based Knowledge Transfer; scoping

The first activity in task 29 was the scoping of the text-based knowledge transfer, which implied a review of target audiences and the drafting of a provisional table of contents with authors and/or links to task-final reports, size of chapters/ sections, etc. This report is the result of this activity, in tune with task 28. FLOODsite is...

Towards Sustainable Flood Risk Management in the Rhine and Meuse River Basins

Flood risk (defined as a result of flood probability and potential damage) along Rhine and Meuse rivers is expected to increase in two ways: A. Climate change will cause a significant increase in the probability of extreme floods (according to a majority of climate change scenarios). B. The potential damage of floods (the level of investments in...

Room for the Rhine in The Netherlands: Summary of research results

Raum für den Rhein in den Niederlanden: Zusammenfassung der Untersuchungsergebnisse

Ruimte maken voor de Rijn: Samenvatting van wat het onderzoek heeft opgeleverd

Room for the Rhine branches in The Netherlands: What the research has taught us

Ruimte voor Rijntakken: Wat het onderzoek ons heeft geleerd

Uiterwaardverlaging: Gevolgen voor landbouw en natuurontwikkeling