PhD defence T.S. (Tom) van der Voorn

Below is a brief summary about the dissertation:

Climate change has emerged as one of the biggest environmental challenges the world is currently facing. Obviously, climate change affects water management in multiple ways. In the past two decades, adaptive water management has become the main response in water management to the impact of climate change effected by making minor alterations in order to build the resilience of people and nature. However, climate change has laid bare the limitations of adaptive water management which is aimed at reducing the impact of climate change through resilience-building and minor alterations. 

This responsive approach, which is based on incremental-based adaptation, has proved to be insufficient or counterproductive in the face of more extreme weather events. Therefore, Water management and its strategies need to move beyond incrementalism – to become more transformative – and in order to maintain people’s well-being in the long run in the face of the expected impacts of climate change. It is against this backdrop that this research on backcasting for climate adaptation can help to contribute to a better understanding of the potential of backcasting for adaptation and how it could be applied in water management. The aim of the this research is to improve our understanding of the relevance of normative approaches to climate adaptation, particularly where visioning and backcasting are concerned, and to discover what is needed to further advance backcasting for transformative climate adaptation purposes.