Weekly world flood update

This week I came across numerous news items, reporting floods occurring everywhere around the world... No wonder that the Proventium Consortium has a specific newsletter specifically concerning floods (you have to register first and then click the newsletter topics of your choice)!
 
Oxfam reports floods in Niger, affecting more than half a million people and causing 80 casualties. The floods are due to heavy rains and have caused a lot of damage to especially the agricultural sector. Food prices are expected to rise sharply in the coming months.
 
In Cameroon, heavy rains caused the breach of a large water reservoir, which surprised the North Eastern parts of the country (and also parts of Nigeria). Also in this case, huge secondary flood impacts are expected, especially in the field of health – cholera, malaria, and other infectious water related diseases.
 
More than a million people are displaced in the North Eastern part of India (bordering Bangladesh, where downstream flood waters are also expected). Next to reports of casualties and damage to properties, also the National Park has been affected (photo Indian Times).

Tidal River Management in Bangladesh - part I

Until December 2012, Jan van Minnen and I will perform MSc thesis research in Dhaka and Khulna, Bangladesh. Fundamentally, our goal is to find if and how Tidal River Management can contribute to relieving problems related to drainage congestion in the Southwest Delta.

In the 1950s, polders were constructed in the tidal southwest delta of Bangladesh to decrease flood vulnerability, increase food production and to promote socio-economic development of the area. Old floodplains were transformed into polders and became highly productive agricultural areas. However, river sedimentation started to occur and as of the 1980s drainage congestion started to occur. This led to widespread socio-economic problems and the loss of livelihoods.

In 1990, farmers at Beel (polder) Dakatia cut the embankment of their polder in order to increase drainage congestion. This strategy has been named Tidal River Management afterwards, and is based on increasing tidal prism (the volume of water entering and leaving the delta between high and low tide) to increasing river flow, which results in the transport of sediment from the river to the polder.

The ultimate question is whether Tidal River Management can be regarded a sustainable strategy to decrease the problems related to drainage congestion in the SW delta. Can Tidal River Management increase flood resilience and contribute to socio-economic development of the impoverished southwest delta of Bangladesh?

To be continued soon…!

Abstraction versus the Richness of Being?

After quite a while of struggling with the abundance of theories, questions and concepts, I finally submitted my proposal to my research school. A true relief, but it also poses a brand new question: what am I going to do?

Again, as it turns out, the possibilities are abundant. After some random exploring and discussions with fellow PhD candidates I’ve now come up with the idea of using mental maps (or cognitive maps, or concept maps, or whatever you want to call them). Mental maps can be used for many different types of research, and so far I’ve come across literature varying from exercises that try to map how people (children appear to particularly interesting for this) perceive cities, or the use of mental maps to figure out the functioning of brains. This last strand of mental map use made me think of this Muse song:

I’m not quite sure what this means about the functioning of my brain though… I’m not going to use mental maps in my interviews for doing psychological studies or neuro-focussed cognitive studies. I’m going to use these maps as a tool to figure out how, to speak with Feyerabend, people make abstractions of the richness that surround them. Some call this richness complexity, or wickedness, or even super-wickedness, other argue, and I agree, we should stop using the wicked word alltogether:

“So let’s also agree to stop using the term “wicked problems”. If everything becomes “wicked” or “super-wicked”, then everyone will just give up. We need to work at our democracy, to encourage bright young people – in research and in government – to be filled with enthusiasm for spending their lives working on the big difficult problems of the time”. 

Prep or drown?

Yesterday I read about an upcoming programme at Discovery Channel: Doomsday Preppers. It’s about people that fear the worst and also prepare (prep) to the extreme for that: living in houses with shipping containers as a core, piling up huge amounts of foods and water, being self-reliable in terms of electricity, military drills for self-protection...

It’s interesting to think about how the people featuring in the documentary see risks of possible (but to them, certain) disasters. They are sure that something will happen, even if they don’t know when exactly the volcano eruption or financial crisis will hit. That’s a solid enough basis to entirely design and live their lives, prepared for the worst. The lesson is that too much risk awareness is also not such a good thing - and that not only extreme carelessness (‘I can’t believe you live in a flood plain/under sea level’) but also extreme preparedness exist.

Does it not come to mind, that if preppers are the only (few) ones so well prepared and with lots of resources, it is also most likely that other, less prepared people, will eventually find them and won’t knock on the door friendly, to ask for a cup of soup? Don’t try to survive by yourself, but try to survive with your community!

I’m going to check out at least one episode – for those of you more interested in movies on similar themes, The Road is a good choice!

Cogito Ergo Sun

This week I had a email conversation with Jeroen Warner, one of the senior researchers in our project, about Descartes’ iconic “Cogito Ergo Sum” in relation to the idea/possibility of full (flood) control. Marcel Metze, in his pageturner ‘Veranderend Getij: Rijkswaterstaat in Crisis’ (Changing Tide: Rijkswaterstaat in a Crisis), shows how  ‘control’ (In Dutch: beheersen) is a core keyword in Rijkswaterstaats organisational culture (see page 204).

Today Jeroen pointed me at the name of the Wageningen based solar-studio: ErgoSun. This made me wonder wether this is referring to “I sun, therefore I am” or “I am, therefor I sun”. Eitherway, if we can controll the sunshine, we might aswell controll the waters around us: Cogito Ergo Sun!

Meeting the international risk and disaster management community @ IDRC 2012 in Davos

The two-yearly International Disaster and Risk Conference (IDRC) 2012 was hosted in Davos, Switzerland and to my surprise I was the only representative of Disaster Studies (and Wageningen UR as well). Quite a challenging task! Although the main reason for participating was the opportunity to do a poster presentation on my previous and future work on flood risk management, I also worked as a volunteer for the organization, the Global Risk Forum. This means I had to act as a ‘host’ for conference visitors and support sessions, for example with reporting and session management. A perfect way to combine attendance with helping out the organization, who funded most part of my stay in return.

IDRC is ‘the place to be’ to meet with the international community working in the field of risk and disaster management. The volunteering work gave me numerous opportunities to get in touch with several representatives of institutes that are potential supporters or even partners of my research plans. The PEDRR is a very interesting network, but I could also establish contact with the UN-ISDR, IFRC, FAO and UNDP who are all active, each from their own perspective, in the field of flood risk management. They work in the Bangladesh and Vietnamese deltas and I was already invited to visit some of their running projects there. I got quite a number of enthusiastic reactions on my research plans.

Sessions I participated in were titled ‘Environment and Disaster Risk Reduction: from theory to practice (hosted by PEDRR)’, ‘Integrative risk management’, ‘Mobilising the creation of a risk culture’, ‘Risk, society and culture’, ‘Disasters, environment and migration (with Anthony Oliver-Smith and Jörn Birkmann as panellists)’, ‘Flood Risks’ and ‘Ecosystem based approaches’ (both poster presentations). In later blogs in will zoom in on interesting details of some of them. A last worthy remark on Elsevier’s launchof a new, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

Both in terms of content and ideas, and getting in touch with interested individuals and potential partners for research collaboration of support, the visit was quite successful. I'd recommend to go again in two years time as a group trip!