Kind: captions
Language: en
in Holland the hard lesson of building
hard structures to keep the flood water
out is prompting a sea change in
thinking if you will we are thinking
it's like Judo now we use the forces of
modern nature to help us create this
safety instead of fighting it it's like
a balancing act biologist minder def is
a specialist in an emerging field called
eco-engineering
we are a little bit behind in our
understanding how these natural soft
defenses are contributing to safety and
how this is interacting with climate
change yes we do not know too much about
that but that is what we are now
catching up minder works for daaras a
nonprofit Research Institute in the
heart of the Silicon Valley of water
management the Dutch city of
Del using giant water flows they are
testing ideas on how to design flood
control systems with nature in mind
protecting it using
it simple ideas like planting trees in
front of a dyke instead of making it
higher 2/3 of the Dy is meant to
compensate the water level and a third
of the Dy is meant to compensate the
waves that are working against the
DI and what we will see now is that
there is an effect of the trees and from
our experiments we know quite precisely
how much
trees you need to get rid of a certain
fraction of the waves using the force of
nature not fighting it Judo it all seems
so obvious now but for years Engineers
here overlooked it changing the strategy
the landcape here will not be easy I
think that is a very important lesson to
learn that that if you put in uh um a
hard safety structure that you will have
to deal with all the changes of
ecosystem functioning behind the
structure and that you will be less
flexible in the future to adapt again to
a different circumstances that you are
not really sure of
now