Decision-making on local flood risk measures in area development in unembanked areas

Cities worldwide are facing increasing impacts from climate hazards such as heavy precipitation, heat stress, flooding, and drought, exacerbated by climate change. This study focuses on unembanked areas (NL: buitendijkse gebieden), vulnerable to flooding due to factors like sea-level rise, river peak discharges, and land subsidence. However,...

The effects of floods on residential property values

Being both a low-lying delta and having one of the most significant mortgage-to-debt-to-GDP ratios in the world, the Dutch economy is vulnerable to damages to real estate due to floods as this could lead to large-scale householder default and ultimately destabilize their economy. Notwithstanding, a generic and widely adopted tool to assess flood...

Asset management of flood defences as a co-production: An analysis of cooperation in five situations in the Netherlands

Flood defences are in practice often multi-used, multi-managed and multi-financed. Flood defence asset management contains technical, organizational and spatial complex issues involving multiple organizations. In the literature, little attention has been given to the conditions for successful cooperation between organizations in flood defence...

Systemic risks and solar climate engineering research. Integrating technology ethics into the governance of systemic risks

The paper explores how the framework of systemic risks can help govern the risks imposed through solar climate engineering research. The central argument is that a systemic perspective of risk is a useful tool for analysing and assessing the risks imposed through Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) research. SAI is a form of climate...

Unpacking notions of residents' responsibility in flood risk governance

Environmental disasters, and especially floods, are among today's biggest sustainability challenges. The number and intensity of floods are increasing, challenging current governance approaches. Governments worldwide are looking to diversify their flood risk management and adaptation strategies, among others, by increasing resident involvement...

Boundary spanning and adaptive capacity in Pearl River Delta megacities

The cities of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) have been experiencing an unprecedented urban expansion for the past four decades, leading to emergence of one of the most populous and dynamic urban regions. However, these rapidly expanding cities located in a low-lying delta area also face increasing flood risk due to a combination of anthropogenic...

Governing climate risks in the face of normative uncertainties

Governing risks is not only a technical matter, but also a matter of ethical and societal considerations. In this article, we argue that in addition to scientific and technical uncertainties, we need to also address normative uncertainties of risk decisions. We define normative uncertainties as situations where there are different partially...

Safe-by-Design: Stakeholders' Perceptions and Expectations of How to Deal with Uncertain Risks of Emerging Biotechnologies in the Netherlands

Advanced gene editing techniques such as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR)/Cas have increased the pace of developments in the field of industrial biotechnology. Such techniques imply new possibilities when working with living organisms, possibly leading to uncertain risks. In the Netherlands, current policy fails...

Risk governance of potential emerging risks to drinking water quality: Analysing current practices

The presence of emerging contaminants in the aquatic environment may affect human health via exposure to drinking water. And, even if some of these emerging contaminants are not a threat to human health, their presence might still influence the public perception of drinking water quality. Over the last decades, much research has been done on...

Bridging the legitimacy gap—translating theory into practical signposts for legitimate flood risk governance

Legitimacy is widely regarded as a founding principle of ‘good’ and effective governance, yet despite intense academic debate and policy discourse, the concept remains conceptually confusing and poorly articulated in practice. To bridge this gap, this research performed an interpretive thematic analysis of academic scholarship across public...