Transforming (flood)plains

Abstract

The agricultural plains of Thessaly in Greece have been historically sensitive to flooding. These floods result in extreme socio-economic, spatial and environmental consequences, whose severity is heavily impacted by human actions manipulating the natural ecosystems of the region. Specifically, the extensive urbanization of Thessaly’s agricultural landscape – one of the main productive agricultural cores of Greece – combined with the anthropogenic alteration of the hydrological system to address the region’s water scarcity problem, are leading towards the appropriation and exhaustion of the water ecosystem. This has contributed to the extent of the negative consequences in extreme cases of flooding, such as this of September 2023, and to the system’s inability to cope, recover and adapt to these events. Therefore, there is an imperative need for the reconfiguration of the existing water and land management framework through transformative actions grounded on ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) and nature-based solutions (NBS), in order to enhance the system’s adaptive capacity to flooding. An area near the Karla Reservoir is used as a case study. The proposed transformations both inform and are informed by local practices, and are supported by land policies, aiming to create an integrated framework for environmental co-management with the intention of activating a process of evolutionary resilience of the Thessalian plain to flooding.

This project proposes a new conceptual framework for understanding risk and its components and a methodological approach for defining how the conditions of different systems affect risk and contribute to the systems’ biophysical and socio-technical limits. A set of criticality and transformability criteria is defined to locate the crucial areas – the critical zones – with the potentiality of transformation. This process is executed by superimposing the biophysical and socio-technical limits and taking into account the current coping and recovery capacities as expressed by the current centralized processes and local adaptation practices. Then, a set of transformative actions is proposed, consisting of biophysical measures drawing from soil and landscape-related nature-based solutions and of socio-technical measures aiming to enhance the learning capacity and preparedness of the community. These actions are subsequently implemented in a critical zone adjacent to the Karla Reservoir, through strategic, systemic, sub-systemic and specific design explorations, with the aim to concretely spatialize the proposed measures by showcasing possible negotiations between agriculture, water and nature. Finally, an adaptation framework and phasing through adaptive design pathways showcases and evaluates the operability of the proposed transformation. The overall goal of the project is the creation of a successful model for environmental co-management, integrating coping, recovery and adaptive capacity, and resulting in fostering evolutionary resilience.