Weather and climate-proof water management

In the Netherlands, climate change leads to excessive local rainfall. This causes severe floods. In order to have effective flood-resilience policies and practices in place, accurate rainfall information and geo-information is needed. However, national rainfall monitoring networks are modest in size, the number of official monitoring stations is very limited and stakeholders are not cooperating as effectively as they could. Therefore, in the Dutch citizen observatory Grip Op Water Altena, citizens, water authorities, municipalities and professionals work together to make the region of Land van Heusden en Altena climate-proof.

Grip op Water Altena is a place (on- and offline) where collected observations, knowledge and warnings are shared, where bottlenecks and measures are constructively discussed along short communication lines and where it is clear which actions are taken by which party. Its vision is that municipalities, water authorities, citizens and farmers understand each other’s interests and ways of working and are together responsible for limiting the damage by pluvial flooding in urban and rural areas.

For updates on the Demo Case, visit the Grip Op Water Altena online platform and follow it on Twitter.