From Dikes to Natural Flood Plains: The Netherlands Changes Approach to Flood Control
The Dutch have been fighting rising seas longer than any nation in the western world. Much of the country lies below sea level, including the capital city of Amsterdam. Traditionally, dikes and concrete barriers have been used to hold back the sea, but now the Netherlands is changing course in its flood control efforts due to climate change. The Dutch are embracing natural flood plains for rivers and mangrove swamps in lieu of levees.
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Climate change is increasing the predictions for sea level rise in this century. As quoted by Reuters, Lennart Silvis, the operational manager of the public-private Netherlands Water Partnership, stated, “We’ve been adapting for 1,000 years. That’s nothing new. It’s just that climate change is going faster than it was before.” The Dutch are looking for a new approach to keep up climate change.
Traditionally, the Dutch built dikes around flooded land and then pumped out the water with windmills, thus reclaiming land from the sea. In fact, there is a saying that, “God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland.” One-fifth of the Netherlands land mass was created by a series of “dikes, canals, dams, sluices, and windmills”. It appears the Dutch are returning to the ways of Mother Nature.
New strategies for providing flood control buffers work with nature rather than against it. Reuters explains:
Rather than dredging sand to maintain beaches, they are looking at dumping piles of sand offshore to create “sand engines” shifted by the tides. Marshes may be renewed to break the power of incoming waves.
There is even a campaign called “Room for the River” which would weaken levees to recreate natural flood plains along rivers, including the Rhine and its tributaries which flooded in 1995 following heavy rainfall that almost led to a calamity.
Not only does the Netherlands face raising sea levels, but river flows are expected to increase by 12.5 percent as glaciers melt in Switzerland. Environmentalists agree, “natural water buffers are a smarter move than building higher flood walls that may not stand the test of time as sea and river levels rise.”
Image by MorBCN on Flickr under a Creative Commons License
