Revisiting Waal River Training by Historical Reconstruction

The Dutch River Waal, a branch of the Rhine, has been trained for centuries to mitigate the effects of ice-jams and improve navigation. The works, started in 1850, involved river straightening and narrowing by a series of transverse groynes. Besides fulfilling their goal, the groynes also created the need to raise flood protection works and...

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...