Building with Nature

Best Poster Award IWA-ASPIRE Hong Kong for Building with Nature

07 November 2019 - Published by Eric Boessenkool
Last week’s IWA-ASPIRE conference in Hong Kong saw IHE Delft’s Tim Busker land the IWA-ASPIRE Best Poster Award with his poster ‘Building with nature for flood resilience: experiences from the North Sea Region’. His poster – one of around 200 presented over the course of the 3-day event – showed how Building with Nature can reduce the risk of flooding, while providing additional benefits to society. His research is part of the Building with Nature project.

Building with Nature is a new approach to water engineering that harnesses the forces of nature, rather than working against them. Tim’s work used data from a range of case studies to demonstrate how effective this can be in reducing the risk of coastal and river flooding compared to so-called “grey” solutions - traditional interventions that rely on building hard infrastructures to keep nature at bay.

Tim’s work flags up a series of key points which will need to be addressed when adopting this approach in the future.

“It’s important to create a solid evidence base, understand the local context, and make a compelling business case,” Tim explains. He also stresses that in the longer term it will be important to adopt the approach into local and national legislation.

Tim Busker is a researcher and project coordinator in Flood Resilience at IHE Delft. He is also partner in the Building with Nature project.

 

Poster 'Building with nature for flood reilience: experiences from the North Sea Region