Abstract
Two thousand years of human interventions has heavily modified the Dutch Rhine river. Situated in a densely populated and developed delta, the river and its infrastructure fulfil important societal functions: safety against flooding, inland waterways, nature, freshwater supply, and agriculture. Programs to improve individual functions increasingly lead to conflicts with other functions and therefore call for an integrated approach. This paper reviews the history of the Dutch Rhine and documents the sectoral improvement programs in recent decades, explaining adverse effects such as the large-scale bed degradation at rates of up to 4 cm per year. The lessons from the past are used to propose avenues for future integrated and sustainable river training and river management, arguing that mitigating adverse effects while maintaining societal functions requires a combination of recurrent sediment management measures and extensive structural measures that may change the layout of the river system.
Highlights
Two thousand years of human interventions have turned the Dutch Rhine river into a regulated river with dikes, groynes, low-flood levees (“summer dikes”), grasslands in the floodplains, and local nature areas
The lessons from the past are used to propose avenues for future integrated and sustainable river training and river management, arguing that mitigating adverse effects while maintaining societal functions requires a combination of recurrent sediment management measures and extensive structural measures that may change the layout of the river system
The objective of this paper is to review experiences in order to formulate lessons learnt and to propose avenues for future river training and river management from an integrated perspective
Summary
Two thousand years of human interventions have turned the Dutch Rhine river into a regulated river with dikes, groynes, low-flood levees (“summer dikes”), grasslands in the floodplains, and local nature areas. Major river improvement programs tend to be sectoral in the sense that they seek to optimize a single societal function or only a few functions, for instance safety against flooding and spatial quality (an amalgam of nature, landscape and cultural heritage) in Room for the River and ecological quality in projects for complying with the Water Framework Directive. These programs paid insufficient attention to their impact on inland navigation and river management. This paper introduces river scientists and fellow river engineers and river managers to the peculiarities of the Dutch Rhine river
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