Towards a robust and well-functioning Rhine River system that can sustainably provide its geo-ecosystem services

The policy programme Integrated River Management (IRM) aims to anticipate climate change and to redress the negative consequences of earlier river engineering interventions. Its objective is to first and foremost ensure a well-functioning river system that can provide its essential ‘public’ geo-ecosystem services: safe discharge of floods,...

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...

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...