By Chris Bentley
The Dutch have been the world's experts at building dikes and keeping back water for centuries. Building dikes to hold back high water is pretty much how the country was formed hundreds of years ago.
Nijmegen sits at a bottleneck on a branch of the Rhine River. Flooding’s been a big risk there pretty much forever, so the Dutch have built and reinforced dikes there pretty much forever to protect the city.
But Schouten, a landscape architect, says that about 20 years ago, those defenses started to crack. Another wake-up call came in 2000, when new climate change projections showed likely flooding and sea-level rise overwhelming many of the country’s dikes. So the Dutch made a big change. Instead of building higher dikes to defend against water, they came up with a new approach, which they called “Room for the River.”
Basically, the government conceded that it can't avoid flooding from either the rivers or the sea entirely. Better instead, they decided, to try to manage floods by clearing out space for high water.