Nature article on risk management for droughts and floods most cited in 2023

The 2023 Willem Koerselman Prize has been awarded to hydrologist Marjolein van Huijgevoort. Along with 90 other authors, she collaborated on a wide-ranging study of the impact of risk management for floods and droughts. The Willem Koerselman prize is awarded to the most cited article with at least one KWR author who has not won the prize previously. With 72 citations, Marjolein van Huijgenvoort’s article scored the most citations in 2023. The number of citations has now reached 136.

Image 1. Marjolein van Huijgevoort presents highlights from her winning article on the impact of risk management for floods and droughts.

Droughts and floods

Globally, vulnerability to droughts and floods has improved thanks to better risk management. However, the impact of these events is still increasing, according to “The challenge of unprecedented floods and droughts in risk management”, which was published online in Nature on 3 August 2022. Using more empirical data, the researchers wanted to identify the causes of changes in the impact of events. They therefore collected extensive data sets for 45 pairs of two successive events at the same location. Van Huijgevoort’s contribution to the study was an earlier analysis of droughts near the Raam river in the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant. The researchers showed that risk management, or improvements to risk management, generally mitigates the impact of the second event. Three factors are important here: the magnitude of the hazard, exposure and vulnerability.

Extreme events

But there is an exception: when the second event is extreme – in other words significantly more dangerous than the first and with more impact than has been seen previously – the impact is also much greater in most cases, despite better risk management. Because such extreme events are not taken into account, protective systems such as dikes or reservoirs do not work adequately. Unfortunately, such extreme events are becoming more and more common, for example because of climate change.

Mitigating the impact of extreme events

Fortunately, the study also identified two pairs of events in which, even though the second event was much more extreme than the first, the impact was still lower: successive floods caused by rain in Barcelona and the Danube floods in Germany and Austria. The study identified the success factors for reducing the impact of extreme events: better governance, high investment in measures, better early warning systems and better disaster response.

International Association of Hydrological Sciences

The contributions to the study described in the article came from 91 researchers, all of whom were members of the Panta Rhei working group of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, a global association of hydrologists dedicated to advancing the field of hydrology in the global community of hydrologists. The IASH initiates research of its own every ten years in global working groups to achieve that goal. Van Huijgevoort: “In the working groups, we collect valuable knowledge and establish a broad knowledge base. The working group asked me to contribute to the study with data that had been collected earlier and to help interpret the new datasets. I think it is wonderful that KWR and I were able to work on such a wide-ranging study. Scientific collaborations of this kind make a genuine contribution to the development of new, valuable knowledge. And receiving the Willem Koerselman Prize is the cherry on the cake – but I see it mainly as recognition for a worldwide network of hydrologists who selflessly contribute to these IAHS studies.”

Willem Koerselman Prize: since 2009

Since 2009, KWR has awarded the Willem Koerselman Prize to the author working at our institute who has been cited most in the past year. It is a way of making it clear what impact research has on the water sector. The man who gave his name to the prize, KWR researcher Willem Koerselman, led the way. In 1996, he published the article ‘The vegetation N:P ratio: A new tool to detect the nature of nutrient limitation’, in the Journal of Applied Ecology with co-author Arthur Meuleman. Since then, that paper has led the KWR rankings, and it has now reached 1999 citations. A commendable achievement that still inspires others today.

Image 2. Willem Koerselman presents the Willem Koerselman Prize to Marjolein van Huijgevoort.