Water-based: responding now to the distant future
Feb 08, 2022
Our water and subsurface systems are being strained to the limits. That is the message of ‘Water-Based’, an essay by Deltares in collaboration with partners. “Different users of our small country are increasingly getting in each other's way,” says senior specialist in Water & Spatial Planning, Frans Klijn of Deltares, who is also a professor at TU Delft.
The Dutch are inventive in their struggle against the water. Locks, dams and dikes protect our country and we have been doing this successfully for centuries. But in recent decades, the increasingly stringent demands of nature, housing and agriculture have led to highly regulated water management. “We have always been able to do an excellent job of controlling the water but the increasingly erratic climate is making that job increasingly difficult. The sea is rising, rainfall is more intense and droughts last longer,” says Klijn.
Rural development
Klijn wrote the fifty-page document in collaboration with colleagues from Deltares and engineering consultancy Sweco, and with the landscape architecture firm BoschSlabbers. He argues that engineers, hydraulic engineers and management authorities cannot continue operating the system within the narrow margins of regulated water management.
“The water mustn't be too high, or too low, there mustn't be too much or too little drainage, it mustn't be too saline or too hazardous. The question is: can we maintain current patterns of land use or should we move to locations that are more suitable?”
Another message of the essay is that land use types are so close to each other that they all affect each other. Klijn gives an example: “Farmers drain their land. That affects adjacent natural areas, which dry up as a result. At the same time, drinking water extraction leads to a fall in the water table. In turn, that reduces harvests. In that way, land use types continuously affect each other and we should consider separating them. The only way to do this is to restructure the country on a large scale: moving housing to higher and inherently safe locations, agriculture to land that is not too wet and nature where it can flourish.”
Debate
Klijn says that the essay is not just another scholarly description of what the Netherlands should look like in a hundred years. “Our main aim is to encourage the debate about an approach to spatial redevelopment that is sustainable in the long term in a changing climate and with rising sea levels,” he emphasises. More than in the past, the planning of the country must be based on an understanding of water and the subsurface, an understanding that Deltares already contributes to local, regional and national planning. “The core of the essay is that we are getting in each other's way too much, frustrating each other because all the different uses are intertwined. We have less and less room to manoeuvre; the Netherlands needs more flexibility. We need to think carefully about the implications of current planning for the longer term. If you build 50,000 homes somewhere now, you don’t want to regret that decision as moving these elsewhere is practically impossible.”
Spatial transition
According to the essay, national coordination is needed to plan the country on sustainable lines. “You can see how landscape architects, water authorities and water managers want more direction from the national government. The regional alliances can't solve everything themselves. Provincial and municipal authorities are mapping their wet and dry areas to identify the best locations for new homes. But they can't address larger-scale issues on their own; national direction is needed to coordinate things properly. We already have the energy transition and the agriculture transition, and they also benefit from a spatial transition. In this way, we can pool forces to contribute to the future-resilient structuring of our country.”
Physiographic map of the Netherlands
A new physiographic map of the Netherlands shows the location of the bottlenecks in the water and subsurface described in the essay. The map was used to identify locations suitable for land-based agriculture, water-based nature areas and large-scale housing. The map shows where things get too dry, too wet, too soft, too saline and too dangerous. There are also places where several problems meet, such as the low peat areas on soft and wet ground in the west and north-east of the Netherlands. Large-scale housing construction is undesirable here. The dangerous areas are those threatened by sea level rise and higher river discharges. Klijn: “It makes sense to start thinking now about where the urban concentrations should be located in a century from now. Do you want to make the Randstad in the west of the country more vulnerable with more housing or is it better to move to the Zandstad – the zone around Breda, Tilburg and Eindhoven – places that are higher and safer? In Germany, the Ruhr area was once the country's economic powerhouse but it has been overtaken by Frankfurt and the Munich area.”
More News and Articles
Mar 27, 2024
News
USU Study Looks at Water Main Break Rates in the U.S. and Canada
Report Highlights Correlation Between Material and Diameter
Mar 26, 2024
News
Update BE-21: New Material in Course and Modules on Trenchless Pipe Installation
Online training on the topic of pipeline installation in civil engineering: Trenchless technology for underground drainage construction can be a resource-efficient, environmentally friendly, time-saving, and cost-effective alternative to open cut methods. The UNITRACC e-learning course "Utility Tunnelling" has been enhanced …
Mar 25, 2024
Article
Bacteria as a new weapon in wastewater treatment
In early November, San Diego based startup Aquacycl officially opened its first European office and test center at the Water Campus in Leeuwarden. The Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA) and the Investment and Development Agency for the Northern Netherlands (NOM) …
Mar 22, 2024
News
A superior HDD offering
Building on its relationships with leading horizontal directional drilling companies, TRACTO Australia has delivered three new rigs to operator Superior HDD.
Mar 20, 2024
News
New portable water filtration technology could improve access to clean drinking water worldwide
The University of Texas at Austin has developed an injectable water filtration system with the aim to aid the over two billion people worldwide who are without clean drinking water.
Mar 18, 2024
News
Global Student Innovation Challenge Calls on Next-Generation Leaders to Tackle Water Security
High School and University Students Worldwide Invited to Expand Water Access and Community Resilience
Mar 15, 2024
News
New water treatment wins Prestigious Award
Introducing a advancement in water treatment, developed by Cardiff University researchers in collaboration with Origin Aqua, the FreeOxTM technology has garnered acclaim by winning a prestigious challenge award at the World Water Tech Innovation Summit. This single-step process not only …
Mar 13, 2024
News
Satellite-based river monitoring technique could provide early warning of flooding
A satellite-based method for monitoring the flow of rivers from orbit could provide a valuable early warning system for flood risk, University of Glasgow researchers have claimed.
Mar 11, 2024
News
Revitalising infrastructure with HDD
Through the use of horizontal directional drilling, TasWater is delivering a new sewer pipeline to improve sewer and stormwater transfer capacity in Launceston, Tasmania.
Mar 06, 2024
News
Picking up the pace on climate action: Building momentum from COP28
At the halfway point of the Paris Agreement, the legally binding international treaty on climate action, average global temperatures are already hitting 1.8°C above pre-industrial levels and future projections are stark. At COP28 in December, we could not escape the reality …
Mar 01, 2024
News
Luminescent sensor detects ‘forever chemical’ pollution in water
Researchers in the UK and Germany have developed a new approach for detecting pollution from ‘forever chemicals’ in water through luminescence.
Feb 28, 2024
Article
BETT installation demonstrating GHG emissions reduction of wastewater treatment
This study presents BioElectrochemical Treatment Technology (BETT) as a new wastewater management solution toward the Net-Zero future. The results reported herein were collected from a BETT pilot system installed at a large brewery in Los Angeles, CA, United States processing …
Contact
Deltares
Franz Klijn
2600 MH Delft
Netherlands
Phone:
+31 88 335 8273
Fax:
+31 (0)88 335 8582