Climate change leads to more extreme weather and sea level rise. Storms will become more frequent and conditions will become more extreme with higher wind speeds and higher waves. Rainfall and correlated with that river discharge will change under influence of climate change resulting in longer dry periods of low discharge on the one hand and more extreme high discharges on the other. Predictions of sea level rise range from several decimeters to several meters in 2100. As dykes, ports and coastal structures typically are built for a lifespan of at least 50-100 years climate change has to be taken into account in the design. Svašek Hydraulics has broad experience in applying climate change scenarios of KNMI/IPCC. With our numerical flow and wave models we can determine the design conditions with climate change scenarios properly accounted for.
Climate change is one of the reasons that Svašek Hydraulics is a big fan of soft coastal protection measures according to the Building with Nature principle whenever possible. Unlike hard coastal structures, soft coastal protection can be adapted later on more easily. This eliminates the necessity to design for worst case climate change scenarios which is needed for hard coastal protection structures to guarantee a certain lifespan. As climate change will alter the design conditions over the years a Building with Nature soft coastal protection can simply follow at the same pace by natural evolution combined with extra maintenance.
