Climate Change Risk Management in Transnational River Basins: The Rhine

Abstract

Climate change is likely to have an impact on the discharge of the European river Rhine. To base adaptation strategies, to deal with these changing river discharges, on the best scientific and technical knowledge, it is important to understand potential climate impacts, as well as the capacity of social and natural systems to adapt. Both are characterized by large uncertainties, at different scales, that range from individual to local to regional to international. This review paper addresses three challenges. Dealing with climate change uncertainties for the development of adaptation strategies is the first challenge. We find that communication of uncertainties in support of river basin adaptation planning generally only covers a small part of the spectrum of prevailing uncertainties, e.g. by using only one model or scenario and one approach to deal with the uncertainties. The second challenge identified in this paper is to overcome the current mismatch of supply of scientific knowledge by scientists and the demand by policy makers. Early experiences with 'assess-risk-of-policy' approaches analysis of options, starting from the resilience of development plans, suggests that this approach better responds to policy makers' needs. The third challenge is to adequately capture the transnational character of the Rhine river basin in research and policy. Development and implementation of adaptation options derived from integrated analysis at the full river basin level, rather than within the boundaries of the riparian countries, can offer new opportunities, but will also meet many practical challenges.

Understanding flood regime changes in Europe: a state-of-the-art assessment

“…In a similar fashion, the vulnerability and bottom-up approaches start at the local scale of households and communities to explore what conditions enable successful coping with floods (Wilby and Dessai, 2010). The focus is on the vulnerability and resilience of the risk-related system itself rather than on climate projections (Hall and Murphy, 2011;van Pelt and Swart, 2011) with the aim to develop robust and flexible strategies for dealing with changing floods.…”

Climatology in support of climate risk management

“…However, as the climate communities' understanding of the large scale mechanisms that influence climate has improved, seasonal to inter-annual to decadal climate forecasts have become a real prospect (Goddard et al, 2010), with some regions showing more promise than others. Understandably this has attracted much interest from a range of climate sensitive sectors such that outputs from seasonal climate forecasts (SCF) are beginning to be incorporated into the decision making processes related to managing risk in industries such as water (van Pelt et al, 2011), energy (Troccoli et al, 2010), agriculture (Crane et al, 2010) and insurance. Because of seasonal climate forecasting's rapid development as a science, there have been a number of recent reviews of its nature, current status and prospects (Brunet et al, 2010;Dobles-Reyes et al, 2013;Stockdale et al, 2010).…”

The added value of system robustness analysis for flood risk management illustrated by a case on the IJssel River

“…Secondly, the projected climate change could lead to higher design discharges (Bruggeman et al, 2011), although it is found difficult to discover a trend in discharge data for the Rhine, even if climate change has an effect (Diermanse et al, 2010). Also, it is expected that the Rhine discharge entering the Netherlands reaches its physical maximum at 18 000 m 3 s −1 (Pelt and Swart, 2011). Assuming that the Rhine design discharge will increase to 18 000 m 3 s −1 in 2100, the IJssel design discharge could increase to (0.18 × 18 000 =) 3240 m 3 s −1 .…”