Using adaptation tipping points to prepare for climate change and sea level rise: a case study in the Netherlands

Abstract

Studies on the impact of climate change and sea level rise usually take climate scenarios as their starting point. To support long-term water management planning in the Netherlands, we carried out a study that started at the opposite end of the effect chain. In the study we refer to three aspects of water management, flood defense, drinking water supply, and protection of the Rotterdam Harbour. We examined whether, and for how long, current water management strategies will continue to be effective under different climate change scenarios. We did this by applying the concept of 'adaptation tipping points', and reached it if the magnitude of change is such that the current management strategy can no longer meet its objectives. Beyond the tipping points, an alternative adaptive strategy is needed. By applying this approach, the following basic questions of decision makers are answered: what are the first issues that we will face as a result of climate change and when can we expect this. The results show, for instance, that climate change and the rise in sea level are more likely to cause a threat to the fresh water supply in the west of the Netherlands than flooding. Expressing uncertainty in terms of the period that the existing strategy is effective (when will a critical point be reached) was found to be useful for the policy makers. 

Decision Making and Adaptation Processes to Climate Change

“…Opposite to this, systems, which their current vulnerabilities have already been approached, and present a current low risk, such as the case of Rotterdam city located in Rhin river delta in Holland, may advance in strategies focused on future vulnerability conditions, which means an adaptation process different from the process assisting current relevant vulnerabilities. (Kwadijk, et al, 2010). In both cases, the delta of Ganges River or delta of Rhine River, we find similar situations of adverse hydro-climate events exposure (low elevation plateaus and expose to floods of fluvial or coastal origin) but with current vulnerability conditions very different which imply different adaptation needs as well.…”

Developing dynamic adaptive policy pathways: a computer-assisted approach for developing adaptive strategies for a deeply uncertain world

“…In contrast to Kasprzyk et al (2013), we pursue a pro-active solution to the problem by using robust optimization. Robust optimization methods aim at finding optimal outcomes in the presence of uncertainty about input parameters that are not overly sensitive to any specific realization of the uncertainties (Ben-Tal andNemirovski 1998, 2000;Bertsimas and Sim 2004;Bai et al 1997;Kouvalis and Yu 1997). In robust optimization, the uncertainty that exists about the outcomes of interest is described through a set of scenarios (Mulvey et al 1995).…”

“…Robustness can be operationalized in a wide variety of ways (see e.g. Rosenhead et al 1973;Wald 1945;Savage 1951;Simon 1955;Kouvalis and Yu 1997). In the EMA literature, robustness has been defined as the first order derivative of the objective function (McInerney et al 2012); as a reasonable performance over a wide range of plausible futures (Lempert and Collins 2007); relative, based on regret (Lempert et al 2003); and as sacrificing a small amount of optimal performance in order to be less sensitive to violated assumptions (Lempert and Collins 2007).…”

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

“…We established the policy tipping points for various water management issues, including coastal protection and flood defense, and distinguishing between policy strategies and individual measures (Passchier et al 2009;Kwadijk et al 2010). This revealed that the present policy strategy can be continued for at least this century and probably several centuries to go, as long as the sea level rise does not exceed 1.5 m per century.…”