Sinking deltas: trapped in a dual lock-in of technology and institutions

Abstract

In delta areas, flood protection structures and large-scale land reclamation are preferential water management strategies to cultivate soft delta soils. Over the past decades, river embankments, upstream dams, land reclamation, and groundwater use have intensified, and increasingly contribute to subsidence. In addition, the influence of institutions implementing these strategies has strengthened as they have acquired technical skills, knowledge, and vast financial resources. Sinking deltas are therefore trapped in a dual lock-in as dominating technology and institutions act as constraints to moving into a more long-term sustainable direction. Nine factors for the lock-in are introduced and illustrated for delta regions in Asia, Europe, and the US. To gain a better understanding of what researchers and practitioners can do to address the dual lock-in, a practical case is presented of Gouda, a Dutch subsiding city in search of more sustainable strategies and institutions. The paper ends with three steps to change the configuration of a dual lock-in: (1) getting to know the lock-in; (2) temporarily bypassing it; and (3) constituting a new, more sustainable lock-in. These steps should be further investigated in action-oriented research programmes with local experts, and targeted to policy processes and human behaviour in the sinking deltas.

Advances and Practices on the Research, Prevention and Control of Land Subsidence in Coastal Cities

“…Recent research has been focused on the reconstruction of human-induced land subsidence in the coastal plain enabling the quantification of long term subsidence rates, the development of methods and algorithms to quantify and predict land subsidence by peat compression and oxidation Koster et al, 2018aKoster et al, , 2018bKoster et al, , 2018cVan Asselen et al, 2018), characterization of void ratio and compressibility of peat and 3D distribution of organic matter to implement in the 3D geological (GeoTOP; TNO-GSN) voxel model of the Netherlands (Koster et al, 2018a), monitoring of surface motion (Hanssen et al, 2018), existing governance lock-ins and path dependency in subsidence (Seijger et al, 2018).…”

Framework for High‐End Estimates of Sea Level Rise for Stakeholder Applications

“…Most individual infrastructure decisions are 100 years or less in time scale, with notable exceptions such as nuclear power stations. However, there are longer-term implications of individual decisions on, say, the development of a city or protection of a delta, and resulting lock-in for adaptation decisions (e.g., Seijger et al, 2018). These are issues that need to be explored with the relevant stakeholders.…”

The 6M approach to land subsidence

“…flood protection and pumping stations that drain the land), but also to the institutional and financial aspects. Institutions that have implemented these adaption measures and strategies have strengthened as they have acquired the requisite technical skills and knowledge, and the necessary vast financial resources (Seijger et al, 2018). As a result, over time it was increasingly easy to implement an adaptation strategy to subsidence problems.…”