Abstract
Densely populated deltas are so vulnerable to sea level rise and climate change that they cannot wait for global mitigation to become effective. The Netherlands therefore puts huge efforts in adaptation research and planning for the future, for example through the national research programme Knowledge for Climate and the Delta Programme for the Twenty-first century. Flood risk is one of the key issues addressed in both programmes. Adaptive management planning should rely on a sound ex-ante policy analysis which encompasses a future outlook, establishing whether a policy transition is required, an assessment of alternative flood risk management strategies, and their planning in anticipation without running the risk of regret of doing too little too late or too much too early. This endeavour, addressed as adaptive delta management, calls for new approaches, especially because of uncertainties about long-term future developments. For flood risk management, it also entails reconsideration of the underlying principles and of the application of portfolios of technical measures versus spatial planning and other policy instruments. To this end, we first developed a conceptualisation of flood risk which reconciles the different approaches of flood defence management practice and spatial planning practice in order to bridge the gap between these previously detached fields. Secondly, we looked abroad in order to be better able to reflect critically on a possible Dutch bias which could have resulted from many centuries of experience of successful adaptation to increasing flood risk, but which may no longer be sustainable into the future. In this paper, we explain the multiple conceptualisation of flood risk and argue that explicitly distinguishing exposure determinants as a new concept may help to bridge the gap between engineers and spatial planners, wherefore we show how their different conceptualisations influence the framing of the adaptation challenge. Also, we identify what the Netherlands may learn from neighbouring countries with a different framing of the future flood risk challenge.
Highlights
Accelerated climate change may affect societies in various ways, through higher temperatures, rising sea level, more frequent storms, more frequent river floods and higher flood levels, more prolonged droughts, etc
This certainly applies to the Netherlands, which can be considered as one big delta of the rivers Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt, but especially as over 55 % of the country’s surface area is floodprone, whereas 40 % lies below mean sea level
Where conventional adaptive management may rely on trial-and-error and sound monitoring of developments, adaptive delta management is faced with the fact that, for example in the design flood levels, the signal of climate change cannot be derived from measurements soon enough against the large noise of natural climate variability (Diermanse et al 2010)
Summary
Accelerated climate change may affect societies in various ways, through higher temperatures, rising sea level, more frequent storms, more frequent river floods and higher flood levels, more prolonged droughts, etc. This made the Netherlands’ government solicit advice from an independent committee, the so-called Second Delta Committee This committee advised on a Delta Programme, a Delta Fund and a Delta Commissioner to be installed, in order to ensure that a long-term adaptation strategy be drafted for integrated water management and spatial planning in view of a definitely changing climate, a surely rising sea level and probably changing river discharge regimes (Delta Committee 2008). These advices were followed up, which means that the Delta Programme—which formally started in 2010—can be considered as the national authorities’ response to the Second Delta Committee’s advice. Before proposing this conceptual scheme in the core of this paper, we first give a brief overview of recent developments in tackling the adaptation challenge, and we recall the key concepts of flood risk analysis and principles of its management
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