Water as Leverage - Wadden Sea Region

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Water as Leverage for Climate Adaptation: Wadden Sea Region Ribe Water threats from all sides Challenges HERITAGE IN DANGER! In the city of Ribe, the stream is raised via four stems (small sluices). This heightened water table heavily affects the humidity and groundwater level of the soil, which consists of a high percentage of organic material. How come? Historically, new buildings were always built on the debris of the old ones (often in wood), creating a soil which contains organic materials. In short, they call this kind of soil a ‘cultural swamp’. It renders the soil very sensitive to changing humidity conditions. As such, the current water table must be maintained or sometimes even kept high enough as to not compromise the structural characteristics of the old buildings. Changes in the urban fabric have proven to be dangerous — for example, the recent repavement of the square around the church affected the water table and the consistency of the soil, which impacted the stability of some old buildings, as cracks started to appear. Climate change is bringing periods of more extreme rainfall and drought, thus surely impacting these soil conditions even more, putting the valuable built heritage of the city at risk. WATER FROM THE EAST, WATER FROM THE WEST Each year, Ribe has to deal with flooding, coming from different parts of the water catchment area. There is an excess of water coming from the whole catchment area in the east, which spans over 960 km 2 . In winter times, the land more upstream becomes too saturated with water, which causes a sudden flash flood — or flom — to arrive in the urban center of Ribe. The stems, which regulate the water level, cannot handle this huge amount of water, and the river exceeds its borders. The waterways in the city center are literally bottlenecks, and flooding happens regularly. From the west, the water threat is coming from the sea. The sea dyke with the sluice Kammerslusen was built in 1912 and is currently 7 meters high. This infrastructure is a critical point in the whole water protection of Ribe on two levels. On the one hand, the dyke and sluice need to be renewed in the future in order to deal with the predicted sea level rise. On the other hand, there are currently floods happening when the discharge of water through the sluice into the sea is not possible. There is a build-up of water at the level of the sluice, and when heavy rains occur, this huge amount of water reaches the city center of Ribe. The area between the dykes and Ribe city is covered by the water every year during winter months. More and more often, the water even reaches the city center... It is inevitable that this will only worsen in the future, when heavy rains occur more frequently. This two-fold threat in the west poses a lot of questions related to the renewal of the dyke and sluice. 10 Ribe
Setting the Scene for a Call for Action TOURISTIC PRESSURE On average there are a million people a year visiting Ribe. While the housing market is protected from this demographic flow by Danish legislation, it still puts quite some pressure on the livability of the city, for example in terms of traffic. On the other hand, a lot of economic activity relies on tourism. Ribe 11
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The Wadden Sea is one of the forefr
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Borkum Setting the scene for a Call
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Further reading Planet Texel (la4sa
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Water as Leverage for Climate Adapt
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water storage above ground difficul
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protected but little biodiversity?
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Water as Leverage - Wadden Sea Region

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