Climate change in the Netherlands: Flood protection

Environment

13.01.2009

by Thijs Westerbeek van Eerten

Dossier index

Copenhagen 2009

Political will... or won´t
Carbon conscience
- Europe's satellite leads climate change study
Copenhagen atmosphere - the Euranet blog
Warming up?
- Climate change in Spain: Desertification
- The Consequences of Climate Change - the 2007 UN Report on Global Warming
- Climate change in the Netherlands: Flood protection
- Climate change in Cyprus: Battling drought
- Climate change in Slovenia: Rising snow lines

What will the rising sea levels mean for a country like the Netherlands? Al Gore’s predictions for the Netherlands in his film An Inconvenient Truth was shocking: Holland would virtually disappear. But can the Dutch cope? And if so, how?

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For a Dutchman it’s a fact of life to live below sea level. In fact, only dykes and dams keep the land from flooding. Holland has been fighting the sea for thousands of years. First with ‘terpen’, artificial hills which remained dry during a flood. Later on with ever stronger and bigger dykes. And in the 20th century gigantic steel and concrete storm barriers were added to the already existing defences forming the famous ‘Delta works’.

Some doomsday scenarios predict the sea level will rise by more than two metres within a century. But can the Dutch keep their feet dry in the face of such alarming statistics?

Mass evactation to Germany

Only last year a special government think tank called the ‘Delta Commissie’ looked into three possible solutions. One is to build a ‘Super dyke’, a gigantic dam, just off the coast in the North Sea. This mega construction would serve as a buffer in a major storm and allow for existing coastal defences to remain as they are now.

Another more viable solution is to strengthen the existing dykes. It would require reinforcement of the dykes, widening them, and sometimes covering them with a hard top layer.

One last, though rather unrealistic scenario, is to evacuate the entire Dutch population. The plan would consist of transplanting the Dutch to Germany.

Is the rise in sea level just more hype?

Some scientists, among them professor Han Vrijling of Delft Technical University, believe the prediction of rising sea levels is over-estimated:

”Until now there is no speeding up of the rising of the sea level. In Holland we have seen sea levels rise by about 18-19 centimetres per century. It’s done that for thousands of years and it’s still doing exactly that.”

Han Vrijling has a point; even the KNMI, the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute agrees that until now no extra rising has been recorded. But how can that be when the atmosphere really is warming up which is something everybody agrees on as Dr. Caroline Katzman of the KNMI explains:

“Water simply takes longer to heat up than air, and since all the earth’s oceans together form a huge body of water, the warming of the seas lag decades behind the warming of the atmosphere. But once it does warm up, the volume of the water will increase and the level of the sea will rise”

If you add the melting of Greenland’s ice cap and the freshwater glaciers to this, the Meterological Institute is absolutely certain that within a century the level of the sea will increase by 35 to 85 centimetres.

The cost of climate change

The reinforcement of the Dutch sea defences will cost billions of euros. But that sounds more alarming than it really is. The costs of maintenance of the whole network of dykes is now 100 euros per Dutchman per year. It would take 300 euros a year per person to keep the country safe for the next hundred years or so.

And what about CO2 reduction? Can global warming be slowed down quick enough to prevent even steeper rising of the level of the sea? Climate-change expert Professor Pier Vellinga took part in the ‘Delta Commissie’ and he has a stark warning:

“If CO2 emissions aren’t reduced the waters will ultimately rise more than 70 metres. Even the Dutch can’t cope with that”.