Flood-risk Management Strategies for an Uncertain Future: Living with Rhine River Floods in The Netherlands?

Abstract

Social pressure on alluvial plains and deltas is large, both from an economic point of view and from a nature conservation point of view. Gradually, flood risks increase with economic development, because the expected damage increases, and with higher dikes, because the flooding depth increases. Global change, changing social desires, but also changing views, require a revision of flood-risk management strategies for the long term. These should be based on resilience as opposed to the resistence strategy of heightening dikes. Resilience strategies for flood-risk management imply that the river is allowed to temporarily flood large areas, whereas the flood damage is minimized by adapting land use. Such strategies are thus based on risk management and ʻ'living with floodsʼ' instead of on hazard control. For The Netherlands, one of the most densely populated deltas in the world, alternative resilience strategies have been elaborated and assessed for their hydraulic functioning and ʻ'sustainability criteriaʼ'.

Assessment of the Netherlands’ Flood Risk Management Policy Under Global Change

“…Since that committee, however, the increasing societal vulnerability has not been taken into account, and has certainly not been anticipated on. Now that this increased and further increasing societal vulnerability is being recognized, as well as the lack of relationship between protection level and risk (Ten Brinke and Bannink 2005, based on the results of Klijn et al 2004b), the policy response is again one of improving the flood defense, as some recent developments show. For recently, the government has begun to revise the Netherlands' flood risk management strategy, in response to debate about the report by Ten Brinke and Bannink (2005) and also in response to the advice of the 2nd Delta Committee (2008), which advised on adaptive water management in view of climate change.…”

“…Flood risk can be defined as probability multiplied by consequence or as a function of a flood hazard's probability and exposure characteristics and the vulnerability of the exposed socio-economic system (Klijn et al 2004b;Samuels et al 2006;FLOODsite 2009). This requires that we not only analyze the expected future development of hazard and flooding probabilities, but also that of exposure characteristics and of the vulnerability of the people and their property and economy.…”

“…This means that all figures below relate to 2050, in contrast to those in the previous sections, which relate to 2100. With the scenarios on sea level rise and design river discharge, we first analyzed the increase in hazard probabilities (Klijn et al 2004b). The expected rise of design water levels differs along the rivers, the coast, in the estuaries where the two meet, and on Lake IJssel.…”

Dilemmas and pathways to dealing with flood problems in twenty-first century China

“…Second, effective flood management strategies are based on experimenting and learning to live with floods; land-use adaptation is essential (Klijn, van Buuren, and van Rooij 2004). A full range of floodplain management tools can and should be used to address the flooding problems in China, but the combination and integrated application of those tools will vary among places and communities.…”

“…Shifting the short-term, smallscale rationality to the long-term and large-scale rationality that a resilience strategy requires is not only a challenge for Chinese society, but globally a major obstacle for the pursuit of sustainability (Klijn, van Buuren, and van Rooij 2004;Turner 2010). As illustrated by the Dongting Lake case (Han 2011), or the Poyang Lake case (Shankman, Davis, and Leeuw 2009) and Tai Lake (Taihu) case ), a resilience strategy requires many trade-offs, each of which embodies a range of difficult social, economic, and political issues including investment, compensation, social justice and social stability, poverty reduction, ecosystem services, and biodiversity.…”