Towards Sustainable River Management of the Dutch Rhine River
Havinga River Dynamics, 6951BA Dieren, The Netherlands
Water 2020, 12(6), 1827; https://doi.org/10.3390/w12061827
Received: 1 June 2020 / Revised: 18 June 2020 / Accepted: 23 June 2020 / Published: 26 June 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Studies on River Training)
Two thousand years of human interventions has heavily modified the Dutch Rhine river. Situated in a densely populated and developed delta, the river and its infrastructure fulfil important societal functions: safety against flooding, inland waterways, nature, freshwater supply, and agriculture. Programs to improve individual functions increasingly lead to conflicts with other functions and therefore call for an integrated approach. This paper reviews the history of the Dutch Rhine and documents the sectoral improvement programs in recent decades, explaining adverse effects such as the large-scale bed degradation at rates of up to 4 cm per year. The lessons from the past are used to propose avenues for future integrated and sustainable river training and river management, arguing that mitigating adverse effects while maintaining societal functions requires a combination of recurrent sediment management measures and extensive structural measures that may change the layout of the river system.
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Keywords:
river training; bed erosion; inland navigation; sediment management; longitudinal training walls; river management
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Havinga, H. Towards Sustainable River Management of the Dutch Rhine River. Water 2020, 12, 1827. https://doi.org/10.3390/w12061827
AMA Style
Havinga H. Towards Sustainable River Management of the Dutch Rhine River. Water. 2020; 12(6):1827. https://doi.org/10.3390/w12061827
Chicago/Turabian StyleHavinga, Hendrik. 2020. "Towards Sustainable River Management of the Dutch Rhine River" Water 12, no. 6: 1827. https://doi.org/10.3390/w12061827
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