There is a clear demand for a collaborative knowledge-sharing on climate adaptation and mitigation. The aim of most climate adaptation platforms is (inter)national knowledge exchange and raising awareness about climate adaptation in urban areas and promote solutions such as Nature-based solutions (NBS) and floating infrastructure. However their multiple benefits are often unknown to the wider public. During seminars (February 2020) in Indonesia climate adaptation measures where mapped and the relevance of the climate adaption platforms such as ClimateScan was evaluated by the means of workshops and a survey. The platform ClimateScan holds now over 5000 locations in 5 main categories of climate adaptation (water, nature, agriculture, energy and people). The conclusions from the workshops in Semarang and Surabaya show high relevance scores for NBS: permeable pavement and swales; for infiltration of stormwater to groundwater; for mitigation of high temperatures with heat stress measures; and flood barriers to mitigate flooding. There were low scores for floating urbanization because this is not a culturally accepted practice in contradiction to other parts of the world. Indonesian floating infrastructure as a floating library, restaurant and airport terminal where mapped during workshops bringing the total of international floating structure locations to 150. The workshops have raised awareness among participants and contributed to capacity building by empowering the participants to map and review climate adaptation measures. A high majority see the value of climate adaptation platforms and will use it in the future.
MULTIFILE
Urbanisation and climate change have an effect on the water balance in our cities resulting in challenges as flooding, droughts and heatstress. Implementation of Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SuDS) can help to restore the water balance in cities by storing and infiltrating stormwater into the subsurface to minimise flooding, restoration of groundwater tables to prevent droughts, lowering temperatures by evapotranspiration to fight heatstress. Urban planners and otherstakeholders in municipalities and water authorities struggle with implementing SuDS at locations where infiltration of water seems challenging. Questions arise as: can you infiltrate in countries as The Netherlands with parts under sea level, high groundwater table and low permeable soil? Can you infiltrate in Norway with low permeable or impermeable bedrock and frozen ground most of theyear? How do you find space to implement SuDS in the dense urban areas of Bucharest? These questions are answered by researchers of the JPI Water funded project INovations for eXtreme Climatic Events (INXCES).To answer the question on ‘can we infiltrate stormwater under worse case conditions?’, testing of the hydraulic capacity take place at rainwater gardens in Norway (Bergen and Trondheim) and (bio)swales in the low lying parts of The Netherlands. The first results show that even under these ‘extreme’ hydraulic circumstances the hydraulic capacity (or empty time) is sufficient to infiltratemost of the stormwater throughout the year.INXCES exchanged researchers on an international level, shared research results with stakeholders and sets up guidelines for design, implementation and maintenance of SuDS to promote the implementation of sustainable water management systems throughout the world.One of the tools used to promote SuDS is www.climatescan.nl, an open source online map application that provides an easy-to-access database of international project information in the field of urban resilience and climate adaptation. The tool is able to map several sustainable urban drainage systems as has been done for Norway, The Netherlands, Romania and other countries in the world.The tool is used for engagement with stakeholders within EU projects as INXCES and WaterCoG and resulted in international knowledge exchange on infiltration of stormwater under extreme climate and geohydrolic circumstances.
Climate change is increasing the challenges for water management worldwide. Extreme weather conditions, such as droughts and heavy rainfall, are increasingly limiting the availability of water, especially for agriculture. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) offer potential solutions. They help to collect and infiltrate rainwater and thus play an important role in climate adaptation.Green infrastructure, such as rain gardens (sunken plant beds) and wadis (sunken grass fields for temporary storage of rainwater), help to restore the urban water balance. They reduce rainwater runoff, stabilize groundwater levels and solve problems with soil moisture and temperature. Despite these advantages, there is still much ignorance in practice about the possibilities of NBS. To remedy this, freely accessible knowledge modules are being developed that can help governments and future employees to better understand the application of these solutions. This research, called GINA (Green Infrastructure in Urban Areas), aims to create more sustainable and climate-resilient cities by developing and sharing knowledge about NBS, and supports local governments and students in effectively deploying these green infrastructures.
INXCES will use and enhance innovative 3D terrain analysis and visualization technology coupled with state-of-the-art satellite remote sensing to develop cost-effective risk assessment tools for urban flooding, aquifer recharge, ground stability and subsidence. INXCES will develop quick scan tools that will help decision makers and other actors to improve the understanding of urban and peri-urban terrains and identify options for cost effective implementation of water management solutions that reduce the negative impacts of extreme events, maximize beneficial uses of rainwater and stormwater for small to intermediate events and provide long-term resilience in light of future climate changes. The INXCES approach optimizes the multiple benefits of urban ecosystems, thereby stimulating widespread implementation of nature-based solutions on the urban catchment scale.INXCES will develop new innovative technological methods for risk assessment and mitigation of extreme hydroclimatic events and optimization of urban water-dependent ecosystem services at the catchment level, for a spectrum of rainfall events. It is widely acknowledged that extreme events such as floods and droughts are an increasing challenge, particularly in urban areas. The frequency and intensity of floods and droughts pose challenges for economic and social development, negatively affecting the quality of life of urban populations. Prevention and mitigation of the consequences of hydroclimatic extreme events are dependent on the time scale. Floods are typically a consequence of intense rainfall events with short duration. In relation to prolonged droughts however, a much slower timescale needs to be considered, connected to groundwater level reductions, desiccation and negative consequences for growing conditions and potential ground – and building stability.INXCES will take a holistic spatial and temporal approach to the urban water balance at a catchment scale and perform technical-scientific research to assess, mitigate and build resilience in cities against extreme hydroclimatic events with nature-based solutions.INXCES will use and enhance innovative 3D terrain analysis and visualization technology coupled with state-of-the-art satellite remote sensing to develop cost-effective risk assessment tools for urban flooding, aquifer recharge, ground stability and subsidence. INXCES will develop quick scan tools that will help decision makers and other actors to improve the understanding of urban and peri-urban terrains and identify options for cost effective implementation of water management solutions that reduce the negative impacts of extreme events, maximize beneficial uses of rainwater and stormwater for small to intermediate events and provide long-term resilience in light of future climate changes. The INXCES approach optimizes the multiple benefits of urban ecosystems, thereby stimulating widespread implementation of nature-based solutions on the urban catchment scale.
Water treatment companies are more and more interested in chemical-free water treatment. This is a solution that might not only decrease costs of chemicals, but also decrease possible formation of by-products and contribute to decreasing the introduction of emerging contaminants in the environment. A possible route for this is the use of magnetic fields based treatment. Magnetic fields exist around us (our planet is surrounded by such fields) but are not broadly used in water treatment. A reason for this situation isthe fact that water treatment is a rather traditional market and magnetic treatment, conversely, a rather controversial and (still) not completely understood. Even with such resistance, recently it has been shown that magnetic fields applied to drinking water resulted in significant structural change of its microbiome [1]. This community structural change was clearly detected with a newly developed flow cytometry method, where the phenotypic characteristics of the entire microbial community could be analysed instantly [2-9]. Lab-scale batch experiments have shown that magnetic fields can selectively boost the growth of smaller bacteria [1][3] and indicated as a next step that the same principle could be addressed in pilot scale tests. ISusMag is structured to apply the robust and instant flow cytometry method to examine the effect of magnetic fields on drinking water at pilot scale under realistic field conditions. For this purpose, groundwater will be evenly distributed into two (pipe)lines of the same length: one will be magnetically treated, and one will be used as control. Samples will be taken at the end of the two pipes for flow cytometry examination. Measurement results can help drinking water companies to understand whether a magnetic treatment is an alternative to control the growth of pathogenic bacteria instead of classical chemical treatment (disinfection).
