The Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) and the Earth Sciences Department at VU Amsterdam are happy to announce that we will lead a new project on groundwater and risk funded by the Water4All partnership. The list of funded projects can be found here.
GroundedExtremes (“Understanding and governing groundwater to reduce risk of hydrological extremes”) is a 3-year project with eight international partners, which aims to bring important scientific innovations in the field of groundwater hydrology, drought research, and risk management and provide the evidence for improved groundwater management to reduce both drought and flood risk.
Hydrological extremes are expected to occur more frequently and become more severe in the future. Improving drought and flood risk management is essential to deal with these increasingly extreme events. The GroundedExtremes project aims to investigate groundwater processes in relation to hydrological extremes and the potential for improved groundwater management as a powerful adaptation strategy to both droughts and floods, avoiding long-term unintended consequences and unwanted trade-offs. Our comparative case study analysis in four regions with different physical and societal contexts is built around the concepts of knowledge exchange and transferability.
Anne Van Loon, GroundedExtremes PI and associate professor of Drought Risk at IVM, is enthusiastic about this new project. “It brings together hydrogeologists, social scientists, and practitioners to in an interdisciplinary research project. We will analyse and model the interactions between physical (climate drivers, hydrogeological processes) and anthropogenic processes (adaptation, policies, governance). This allows us to simulate the trade-offs between adaptation measures related to groundwater on flood and drought risk, as well as the trade-offs in water availability and risk between different water users. This innovative approach will yield insights into the pros and cons of adaptation strategies from a system perspective.”
The GroundedExtremes project aims to study and compare groundwater dynamics, management and governance in four case studies: Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Sweden. The case studies represent countries with different climates and a gradient in water scarcity, experiencing different types and severity of drought impacts, and with unique regulations in place to cope with droughts and manage groundwater. In these cases we will apply an interdisciplinary approach combining quantitative and qualitative data and methods and perform a stress-testing scenario analysis to simulate potential future situations using storylines.
Our partners are Wageningen University (the Netherlands), KWR Water Research (Netherlands), VU-Brussel (Belgium), University of Oslo (Norway), University of Gothenburg (Sweden), Chalmers Technical University (Sweden), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), and University of Sevilla (Spain).
We will soon be recruiting postdoctoral researchers for the project, so if you are interested please keep an eye on this website.
Figure: Making invisible groundwater levels visible to the general public, showing risks of too dry and too wet. © Anne Van Loon
Hydrological extremes @ Amsterdam 