Flood management options for The Netherlands

Abstract

Floods are always in conflict with floodplain development. No amount of structural protection will remove the risk of being damaged by flood flows and the mud and debris and pollution that accompanies them. Hence the challenge is to be prepared to manage floods and mitigate the resulting damage when floods occur. One approach to flood management is to provide space for floods when they occur and keeping that space available when they are not occurring. The challenge is finding the mix of open space and development on floodplains that maximize the net expected monetary, environmental, and social benefits derived from them. This paper discusses some floodplain management approaches being considered in The Netherlands, recently motivated by the extreme flood events that occurred in the mid 1990s and early 2000s. Time will tell if any of these approaches are successfully implemented.

Keywords:

• Floodplain planning
• Rhine River
• modeling
• flood damage mitigation management
• The Netherlands