Over 30 participants joined the shortcourse Geomorphic and Ecological Fundamentals of River Restoration at Sagehen Ck Field Station near Lake Tahoe in August. Weather conditions were ideal, and participants got wet wading in Sagehen Creek and swimming in Lake Tahoe. They saw a wide range of completed projects as well as sites slated for restoration, and made proposals for most effective restoration approaches. Each evening participants enjoyed discussion of the day’s adventures followed by a gourmet meal in plein air. Next year’s shortcourse is set for 18-22 August. Registration opens in January.
The paper Flood diversions and bypasses: Benefits and challenges, published by Dr Anna Serra-Llobet and co-authors, has been recognized by John Wiley & Sons publishers as one of the most-cited papers in the journal WIREs Water.
The paper is freely available on open-access here.
University of California Berkeley Institute of International Studies, Philosophy Hall, Room 223 Monday, November 13, 2023 9am-12pm
Flood losses are increasing worldwide because of expanding urbanization in flood-prone lands and flood peaks super-charged by climate change. Across the globe, countries struggle to manage flood risk, drawing upon insurance, structural measures, and land use regulations. What can we learn from these international experiences to inform strategies in North America? In this workshop, a group of researchers, practitioners and policy-makers from the United States, Canada, and the European Union review the state of the art in flood risk management with emphasis on the interface between insurance, mapping, and land use planning regulations.
Efforts to conserve Lake Tahoe Dr. Sudeep Chandra, Univ Nevada Reno
Friday (11/3) from 12-1pm in Mulford Room 36, UC Berkeley.
Dr. Sudeep Chandra is a Professor of Limnology in the Biology Department at the University of Nevada, Reno (USA). Sudeep Chandra serves as Director of the University’s Global Water Center: Solutions for Sustainability, the Ozmen Institute for Global Studies, and is the former Co-Director of the Lake Tahoe Science Advisory Council.
The talk is part of the Berkeley Wildlife & Conservation Seminar Series
A river floods. A flood control channel is built. Problem solved. Except that everyone hates it. Even the best river restoration plan or flood control plan won’t work if you don’t have the right people at the table before it’s a plan. You’ll need to draw diverse community members into an authentic conversation from the outset, to frame the problem, develop potential solutions, and agree on next steps—in person or in virtual meetings. Your key messages, outreach methods, languages and educational materials need to match your target audiences. Depending on where the waterway is, that can include environmentalists, the Army Corps, land developers, agricultural interests, recreationists, homeowners, nearby residents, businesses, unions and tribal representatives. How well you reach out to and engage those diverse interests will determine whether your river plan succeeds.
Event took place Tuesday 24 October.
Talk given by Daniel Iacofano, followed by a panel discussion with John Hart, Juliet Lamont, and Daniela Peña Corvillon
The Napa River in Napa, California. Photo courtesy of MIG, Inc.
Speaker bio:
Daniel Iacofano (Ph.D., FAICP, FASLA) is internationally recognized as an innovator and thought leader in urban planning and design, facilitation, and consensus building. Co-founder of the firm MIG, Daniel has worked with hundreds of communities and organizations around the world to think strategically and critically about achieving desired change. His projects have included a number of river projects, in which his team helped communities identify solutions to flooding problems that also restore ecological processes in rivers and human access to them. Notable among these was the Napa River project, which has been celebrated as a project that successfully reduced flood risk while restoring river processes.
Panelist bios:
Poet and environmental journalist John Hart is author of sixteen books and several hundred other published works, notably San Francisco Bay: portrait of an estuary (UC Press 2003). Winner of the James D. Phelan Award, the Commonwealth Club Medal in Californiana, and the David R. Brower Award for Service in the Field of Conservation.
Dr. Juliet Lamont is a founder and partner of the environmental consulting practice, Creekcats Environmental Partners LLC, and holds an MS in Wildland Resource Science and a PhD in Environmental Planning from UC Berkeley. She focuses on advancing ecosystem-based strategies for biodiversity restoration, climate resilience, and sustainable development. She advocates for the use of nature-based and “nature positive” solutions as a cornerstone for multi-benefit protection and restoration strategies.
Daniela Peña Corvillon is a Chilean Architect who holds an MLA in Environmental Planning from UC Berkeley (2013). She focuses on design and restoration of natural ecological functions at the interface of human and wild spaces. Daniela works at John Northmore Roberts & Associates in Berkeley, where she plans, designs, and manages various-scale projects that integrate human uses into natural areas, and restore natural functions in the urban environment, in California and elsewhere in the US and abroad.
Terje Tvedt, a Norwegian professor in global history, political science and geography, presented a lecture on The Nile: River of history and conflict, on Wednesday 15 March, in Bauer Wuster Hall, to an audience students, faculty, and researchers drawn from across the campus. Professor Tvedt has published numerous books on general water-society issues and on the river Nile in particular. Among them are a bibliography on the Nile in three volumes, “The River Nile in the Age of the British”, “Water and Society. Changing Perceptions on Societal and Historical Developments” (2020), and “The Nile. History’s Greatest River” (2021, translated into German, Chinese, Italian, Dutch, Italian, Serbian and Arabic). He has also made several TV-documentaries shown by among others National Geographic, Discovery Channels, Documentary Channel and Netflix. For the films, see his YouTube channel.
Tvedt’s lecture on the Nile was a multidisciplinary overview of the geography, hydrology and historical role of the river now running through 11 countries with about half a billion inhabitants, and through the heart of cities such as Cairo and Khartoum. The focus was on the background to current hydropolitics, especially the tense conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia regarding the Renaissance dam on the Blue Nile. Tvedt also discussed the role of Southern Sudan in Nile geopolitics. The talk was sponsored by the Sather Center, Global Metropolitan Studies, Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, and Center for African Studies, UC Berkeley. A video of the talk (beginning after the first several minutes) is available online here.
A recording of the lecture (unfortunately missing the first five minutes of the lecture) is available below:
In this project, two faculty and five students each from Jackson State University (JSU) and UC Berkeley (UCB) will collaboratively assess sites along the Mississippi currently with public access, some of the riverfront without public access, and make recommendations for improving public access in light of current land use, flood control constraints, and evolving opportunities. Read more →
Oblique aerial view of levees flanking channel in the Saramento Delta. Source: website of Congressman John Garamendi
The Mekong Delta is home to 17 million people and is Vietnam’s most productive agricultural region. An international group of scientists warn this week that almost all of the low lying delta will have sunk beneath the sea within 80 years without international action. Its disappearance is the result of both sea level rise and developments such as dams and sand mining. (Image: Muaz Jaffar/EyeEm/Getty Images via BBC Science in Action)
The drowning Mekong delta. The continued existence of the Mekong Delta is threatened by anthropic drivers. Continued business-as-usual resource management in the basin will result in the delta surface dropping by 2 m relative to sea level, which will drown most human and natural values in the delta. Measures to avoid this fate are known, but need to be implemented urgently across scales, sectors, and borders.
May 6, 2022 – The Mekong Delta in Viet Nam could be nearly fully submerged by the end of the century if urgent actions are not taken across the river basin. Continuing with business as usual could drown 90% of this agro-economic powerhouse that’s home to nearly 20 million people – with immense local and global impacts.
Only concerted action by the six countries in the Mekong basin and better management of water and sediments within the delta could avoid such a devastating outcome, argues an interdisciplinary research team in a commentary published today in the journal Science.
Most of 40,000 km2 delta is less than 2m above sea level and is thus prone to climate change induced sea level rise. On top of that, actions in the delta such as over pumping of groundwater and unsustainable sand mining to construct expanding cities across Asia as well as rapid hydropower development upstream threaten the future of the most productive rice basket in Southeast Asia.
“It’s hard to fathom that a landform the size of the Netherlands and with a comparable population might disappear by the end of the century,” said lead author Professor Matt Kondolf from University of California, Berkeley. “Yet, like any river delta, the Mekong Delta can only exist if it receives a sufficient sediment supply from its upstream basin and water flows to spread that sediment across the delta surface, so that land is built at a rate that is equal or greater than global sea level rise.”
In the Mekong, water and sediment flows are increasingly endangered.
“Hungry for renewable energy, countries in the basin develop hydropower dams, which trap sediment, with little regard for system scale impacts. What little sediment reaches the lower Mekong could be mined to meet the demands of the burgeoning real estate sector in the region, which requires great amounts of sand for construction and land reclamation,” summarised co-lead author Dr Rafael Schmitt from University of Stanford.
Shipping in Song Hau, Long Xuyen, Mekong River Delta. Photo by GM Kondolf November 2019.
But not all the blame can be put to upstream actions and global climate change induced sea level rise. In the delta itself, high dikes have been built to control floods and thus enable high intensity agriculture. This also prevents the fertile sediment from being deposited on the rice fields.
However, the drowning of the delta is not a fait accompli. There are steps that can be taken to allow dynamic, natural processes to help prevent the delta from further sinking and shrinking.
“The consensus amongst scientists on the scale and gravity of the threat to the Mekong delta is crystal clear, but it can be countered by ensuring the river’s waters remain muddy and murky with sediment,” said co-author Marc Goichot, WWF Asia/Pacific Freshwater Lead.
“Countries must choose a better development path for the Mekong river and region – one that is based on ambitious but feasible policies, which support a system-wide approach to energy, construction and agriculture that will build the resilience of the delta and benefit all the people and nature that depend on it. Business as usual would spell disaster for the delta,” added Goichot.
The team identify six measures that are feasible and have global precedents and would significantly increase the lifetime of the delta:
Avoid high impact hydropower dams by replacing planned projects with wind and solar farms when possible and if not, building new dams in a strategic way that reduces their downstream impacts;
Design and/or retrofit hydropower dams to enable better sediment passage;
Phase out riverbed sand mining and strictly regulate all sediment mining, while reducing the need for Mekong sand through sustainable building materials and recycling;
Re-evaluate intensive agriculture in the Mekong Delta for its sustainability;
Maintain connectivity of delta floodplain by adapting water infrastructure; and
Investing in natural solutions for coastal protections on a large scale along the delta’s coasts.
”Although the effectiveness of these measures, particularly if implemented in unison, is little disputed in the scientific community, major roadblocks exist for their implementation,” said Dr Schmitt.
Late afternoon on Ken Rach Gia channel, Long Xuyen, Mekong River Delta. Photo by GM Kondolf November 2019.
Some of those measures would conflict with vested interests of certain actors, such as the sand mining industry and hydropower development, and some measures would require coordination among countries to account for system scale impacts and benefits of individual actions.
Countries would also need to agree that the sustenance of the Mekong delta is an important regional policy objective. In Viet Nam, where most of the delta is located, some recent policies try to counter some symptoms of a sinking delta, but there is little acknowledgement of the existential risk to the delta, nor ambition to work on truly systemic solutions.
Implementing the measures will require participation from national governments and international actors as well as new actors, including from the private sector and civil society. But together it is possible to save the delta from drowning.
“A Mekong delta that will thrive beyond the end of this century is possible – but it will require fast and concerted action in a basin that has been riddled by competition, rather than cooperation, between its riparian countries,” concluded Professor Kondolf.
Social Science Matrix, UC Berkeley campus (8th floor of Social Science Building)
Greenville, Mississippi, during the 1927 flood. The flood exacerbated unfair treatment of African-Americans in the area, with Black men forced to work on levee crews. (photo from Clay 1976, US Army Corps of Engineers)
Floods are the most destructive natural hazard, both at the national and international scale, and they disproportionately affect people of color and the poor. To understand this uneven exposure to floods requires that we understand the history of land use and institutional structures that have resulted in current exposure and inequitable allocation of resources for flood protection and for post-disaster aid (‘procedural vulnerability’). One of the most critical agencies is the US Army Corps of Engineers, whose cost-benefit analysis approach tends to preclude flood risk management projects in poor communities. Panelists Danielle Zoe Rivera (UC Berkeley) and Jessica Ludy (US Army Corps) will draw upon their research on these topics and discuss pathways to improving on the current situation.
Presented by Global Metropolitan Studies, the Social Science Matrix, and Riverlab, UC Berkeley.
Panelists:
Danielle Zoe Rivera is an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning in the College of Environmental Design. Rivera’s research examines movements for environmental and climate justice. Her current work uses community-based research methods to address the impacts of climate-induced disasters affecting low-income communities throughout South Texas and Puerto Rico. Rivera teaches on environmental planning and design, community engagement, and environmental justice. Her work has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association, Environment and Planning, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She holds a PhD in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan, a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to joining the University of California Berkeley, Rivera taught Environmental Design at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Jessica Ludy (she/her) is the Flood Risk Program Manager and Environmental Justice Coordinator for the San Francisco District US Army Corps of Engineers. Through the Army Corps’ “Technical Assistance Programs,” Jessica and her team partner with communities in the San Francisco District Area of Responsibility to identify and implement solutions for equitable, just, and sustainable climate adaptation. Jessica also leads the San Francisco district’s efforts to implement the federal government’s priorities to advance social and environmental justice. Jessica’s work is informed and inspired by collaborations and scholarship of researchers and colleagues both inside and out of the federal government, and by the decades of environmental and disability justice leadership from indigenous peoples, people of color, and other historically-marginalized groups. Jessica is a co-chair of the Social Justice and Floodplain Management Task Force at the Association of State Floodplain Managers. Prior to the Army Corps, she worked on flood risk management and floodplain restoration as an environmental consultant, a Fulbright scholar, and at nonprofits. Jessica completed her Master’s in Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley in 2009 where her thesis on flood risk perception behind levees sent her down a rabbit hole to change the way we ‘do’ flood risk management… forever.
