Improving Landscape resilience by integrating measures to adapt and mitigate hydrological EXtremes

LandEX will contribute to increase landscape resilience to floods and droughts by designing and combining various measures at catchment scale that effectively mitigate both these hazards in a synergistic way, and by incorporating them into regional spatial planning.

The approach focuses on using nature-based solutions to affect hydrological connectivity: i.e. measures that slow the flow of water in the landscape can retain water from wet periods to be available during dry periods.

The effects of (multiple) measures at the landscape scale on both flood and drought indicators will be quantified considering their (spatial) interactions and feedbacks, which is needed to detect synergies between different types of measures at various locations in the landscape. This will be achieved by using spatially-explicit hydrological models.

Several adaptation scenarios will be investigated.

These scenarios will be designed in close collaboration with multiple stakeholders to assure the feasibility (in terms of location, biophysical and technical functioning as well as socio-economic suitability, support and maintenance) of the measures.

The proposed measures will consider an assessment of flood and drought hotspots and (dis)functioning of existing mitigation measures.

LandEX will develop a spatial planning tool that will bridge the gap between non-experts´ intuitions about the spatial aspect of water management and expert knowledge on landscape hydrology.