Presentation by Jaap Kwadijk, Deltares, at the Data Science Symposium, during Delft Software Days - Edition 2019. Thursday, 14 November 2019, Delft.

1. Research institute
for water, subsurface and infrastructure
Jaap Kwadijk, Director of Science
Data Science Symposium 2019

2. Characteristics of institute
▪ Independent research institute on water,
soil and infrastructure
▪ 840 people, 114M€ annual turnover
▪ Our motto: ‘enabling delta life’
▪ Legal form: foundation under Dutch law
(no shareholders)
▪ Activities targeted at extending our
knowledge (Not4Profit)
▪ Doing applied research and specialized
consultancy
▪ Working (inter)nationally for public and
private sector
▪ Making use large in-house research
facilities and software
▪ Strong links with Academia
▪ Open source policy
Campus in Delft

3. Our daily business

4. Thoughts on climate adaptation
Jaap Kwadijk

5. 5
Slide borrowed from Nidhi Kalra (Rand)

6. These investments will be pretty big
(World Bank; June 2019)
6

7. What worries us:

8. If this would be true: life time of investments decreases:
we are running out of time
Levensduur van fictieve adaptatie
maatregel voor 50 cm zeespiegelstijging
65 jaar
20 jaar
10 jaar
Accelerated SLR RCP4.5 *
Accelerated SLR RCP8.5 *
Delta scenarios warm, steam 2014
65 year
20 year
10 year
SeaLevelRisecm
Life time of an imaginary measure
designed for 50 cm SLR
Large
uncertainty
Year

9. Within 50 years we might have to decide between these options
What do we need for that?

10. BETTER MODELS??

11. Example: sea level rise => mangrove erosion =
a world-wide flood problem
Suriname
Thailand
400 m
coastline Nov 2001
coastline 2013
these are remnants of
coastal breakwaters,
put in place after 2008
Indonesia
British Guyana
Suriname
Thailand

12. We need something clever to protect this kind of areas
18 december 2019

13. We need something clever to protect this kind of areas
18 december 2019

14. Hard Structures, nature based solutions:
“Happy Mangrove planting”
• Hard structures on muddy beds expensive to keep stable:
• Mangrove replantation. Success rates of 5 – 10 %.
coast-protecting groins, Georgetown
However, after some time,
this is the picture
(90-95 % of the experiments)

15. Although we write great papers about
nature based solutions….

16. This is the level of maturity of nature based
engineering(~19th century)

17. Nature based solutions:
Delta flume experiment with willows
Funding partly via crowd sourcing
http://woodsversuswaves.com./

18. Need for really large scale experiments….
but these are difficult to execute
Salt marsh works
in NL
Permeable dams mimic mangrove
Evolution in time
Permeable dams to reclaim the land

19. So in our view, for climate adaptation:
We need urgently tools that can simulate behaviour of Nature
Based Solutions simply…
… to avoid the most dangerous mistakes in decision making

20. ENJOY THE SYMPOSIUM