Deltascenario's 2024, and the land-use maps underneath them

24 April 2024

Deltares published the Deltascenario's 2024, commissioned by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management and the Delta Commissioner. Four futures for water in the Netherlands, called Ruim, Warm, Vlug and Stoom, combining climate change with socio-economic growth and the pace of emission reduction. In all four, the water challenges grow, and they increasingly stack up in the same regions.

Water models need to know what the land looks like. For this round we updated the land use with the RuimteScanner, working with PBL and the Vrije Universiteit: a map of the present situation and one for each of the four scenarios, plus maps of how much of the urban surface is paved. Those go into the national hydrological model, which is where a scenario stops being a story and starts producing numbers about drought and flooding.

The paved-surface part is the kind of detail that decides whether an answer is any good. Rain that falls on a roof or a road behaves differently from rain that falls on a garden, and how much of a neighbourhood is hard surface is not something you can assume from its land-use class.

The method is described in Actualisering landgebruik Deltascenario's 2023 (Claassens, Koomen & Rijken).