Happy Nice Mall

In many ways, it’s hard to imagine our world of nearly 8 billion people and $85 trillion in annual goods and services without this water engineering. Cairo, Phoenix, and other great desert cities would never have reached their present size. California’s sunny Central Valley would not be such an abundant producer of vegetables, fruits, and nuts.

But when it comes to water, the past is no longer a good guide to the future. The warming of the planet is fundamentally changing the water cycle, and most of the world is unprepared for the consequences.

One of the most alarming wake-up calls came in 2018, when Cape Town, South Africa, had nearly 4 million people turned off their drinking water taps. Three consecutive years of drought had dried up its reservoirs. City officials began announcing “Day Zero”, the date when water will no longer flow into household taps.

As tempting as it may sound, the solution is not to further subjugate nature to our will by building larger, higher, and taller versions of water engineering infrastructure.

Conservation measures helped Cape Town push Day Zero further, and then, thankfully, the rains returned. But no city wants to rely on luck to save itself from disaster. The scientists then determined that climate change made extreme drought in Cape Town five to six times more likely.

Droughts, floods, and other climate-related disasters come with huge price tags. In 2017, three major hurricanes in the US were the leading cause of record $306 billion in damage, more than six times the annual average since 1980. While 2017 may seem like an outlier, climate scientists expect annual disaster costs of this magnitude to be higher than the annual cost of this magnitude. widespread at the end of the century.

As tempting as it may sound, the solution is not to further subjugate nature to our will by building larger, higher, and taller versions of water engineering infrastructure. It’s not against natural processes, but rather working with them and repairing the water cycle rather than continuing to break it. Along with water-saving measures, such approaches can create more resilient water systems. They can also help solve our interconnected water, climate and biodiversity crises simultaneously and cost-effectively.

For example, as floods worsen, instead of raising the height of embankments—which often intensifies downstream floods—we can consider ways to strategically reconnect rivers to natural flood plains. This way we can reduce floods, capture more carbon, recharge groundwater and create critical habitat for fish, birds and wildlife.

The Netherlands, a country known for its advanced water engineering, was not badly damaged by the historic floods of July 2021, thanks to a new flood control approach that gives rivers ample space during flood events. The Maas River (here called the Meuse) flowing through Belgium broke the high flow record last July 1993, but caused less damage than the previous flood. One reason was a recently completed project that diverted floodwaters into a 1,300-acre wetland that traps water and lowers parts of the raging Maas by more than a meter. The wetland also traps carbon and doubles as a nature preserve, offering valuable climate and wildlife benefits as well as recreational opportunities. The Dutch are implementing these nature-based flood control projects at 30 locations across the country, through the “Room for the River” programme.