Governance for Drought Resilience: Land and Water Drought Management in Europe

Abstract

On June 20, 2013, a picture went viral on the Internet in which two students were seemingly sailing through the shopping streets of Enschede, my hometown and the biggest city in the region of Vechtstromen, a water authority in the east of the Netherlands. After an extraordinary downpour it was the first time ever that these streets were flooded. It was quickly forgotten that just days before this same city was regarded a risky “hotspot” of unusually high inner city temperatures after a long heat wave that caused many creeks in its rural surroundings to completely dry out. This example is consistent with a general pattern in many areas in Northwest Europe: weathers are often more extreme than they used to be and water man- agement will have to cope with that, through increasing the resilience of our water systems. This book, based on the many insights that are gathered from the project “Benefit of governance in drought adaptation” (DROP, Interreg IVb NWE) pro- vides an overview of a variety of drought situations in six areas in Northwest Europe, the measures taken to improve these situations and especially an in-depth treatment of the governance conditions that support or restrict the realization of these measures.