The quest to change how we live on land

The Dutch landscape is a servant of many masters. It is intensively used for agriculture, cattle grazing, groundwater extraction, industrial purposes, as well as housing, nature, recreation. The pressure of human activity compounds a host of environmental problems that the Dutch, with their pioneering approach to land and water management, have been coping with for centuries. The "soft soils" in the Dutch lowlands, for example, are vulnerable to land subsidence – they are, slowly but surely, sinking in the sea. About one quarter of the Netherlands is already below the sea level, and the process is picking up speed in the face of urbanization and intensive agriculture.

Climate change poses new, insidious threats to the precarious equilibrium between natural systems stability and human wants. The resilience of the Dutch river system is increasingly tested by climate extremes, which have brought unprecedented droughts and one-in-a-millennia riverine floods in the span of a few years. The Dutch sandy soils are ill-equipped to cope with water scarcity. The islands and peninsulas of the Southwest Delta, themselves lying on land reclaimed by the sea and already fortified against storm surges, are threatened by sea level rise.

The challenge of adapting to a changing climate calls for solutions that are able to catch many birds with the same stone, respecting natural processes and ecosystems health without compromising the livelihood and safety of local communities. These solutions require long-term planning, well-targeted investment, and oftentimes drastic departures from the business-as-usual scenario. They also require a formidable interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary effort to be found.

The ENR Chair of Wageningen University is part of four research projects harvesting the expertise of natural scientists, social scientists, and practitioners to “future-proof” the Dutch landscape and devise sustainable pathways to climate adaptation. Climate adaptation is often a contentious process, where shifting opinion dynamics can cause engineeringly sound, scientifically grounded plans to be either embraced or contested. ENR brings insights into the economic implications of changing how we live on sinking land, river deltas, and drought-prone sandy soils. Crucial questions are, for example, who wins and who loses under different future-proofed scenarios, and whether implementing a given adaptation strategy is socially acceptable in the first place.

Among these four projects, Delta Wealth grapples with the challenges of designing coastal landscapes that can cope with sea level rise for the next 50 to 100 years, while the LOSS project (Living on Soft Soils) focuses on developing new methods to measure, predict and eventually avert land subsidence. The consortium of NAT (Nature-based approaches for climate-robust,sustainableand productivesandy-soillandscapes) explore radical change in the patterns of land and water use after re-naturing the Dutch landscape, with a special eye on drought risk. Nature-positive solutions to flood risk, based on rivers restoration and rewilding, are instead closely examined within the project Crossing Borders at the Grensmaas, which focuses specifically on the pitfalls and trade-offs that hinder implementation.

The knowledge base produced by these projects is particularly consequential and actionable in the Dutch context, but can inform climate adaptation strategies at the global level. Exposure to droughts, particularly flash droughts, is on the rise everywhere on Earth. Over 500 million people live in low-lying deltas, and recent estimates put 23% of the world population (1.81 billion people) at risk of inundation due to floods or sea level rise. The share of the global population that faces a high risk of land subsidence is 19%. These estimates rise steeply if we consider that some adverse weather events tend to occur simultaneously– for example, compound drought-heatwave events. Climate change is a global problem, and so is learning how to live with it.