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Author: Erica Gies

Slow water: can we tame urban floods by going with the flow?

Source(s): Guardian, the (UK)
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After epic floods in India, South Africa, Germany, New York and Canada killed hundreds in the past year, droughts are now parching landscapes and wilting crops across the western US, the Horn of Africa and Iraq. The responses have included calls for higher levees, bigger drains and longer aqueducts. But these concrete interventions aimed at controlling water are failing.

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To reduce the impact of today’s more frequent and severe droughts and floods, a new global cohort of “water detectives” – restoration ecologists, hydrogeologists, biologists, anthropologists, urban planners, landscape architects and engineers – are asking a critical question: what does water want?

[...]

The key to greater resilience, say the water detectives, is to find ways to let water be water, to reclaim space for it to interact with the land. Innovative water management projects aim to slow water on land in some approximation of natural patterns.

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All Slow Water projects must factor in local climate, soil and hydrogeology.

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Hazards Drought Flood
Themes Environment and ecosystems Urban risk and planning
Country and region China
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