Letting the river flow

The magnitude of the flood problems in major watersheds was brought home to much of Europe over the last decade. In rivers such as the Rhine and the Thames, occasional rainfall events may cover much of the total watershed resulting in major flooding.
Many European cities and rural areas now recognize and accept that it is impossible and highly dangerous to try to control or determine the flow of a river in flood. Many of these cities are learning, through painful lessons of tragic losses of lives and properties, to move back from the floodplains and from the natural banks of these rivers. They are learning to respect the flood lands (meadows and marshes) for what they are and to truly value the ecological services they provide. These areas are still used for agriculture, but only seasonally, and are not built upon. Along with this is the effort to build levees that have a more gradual incline, not so restricting, and guiding the flow with a very broad backfill to prevent collapse when overtopped.

The reality of forests is that they are much more complex in their interdependent relations and vulnerabilities. Where forests cannot survive many human activities, forests also cannot withstand the fury of long heavy rains. Many areas of tropical forest along the Sierra Madre suffered from landslides during the series of typhoons. What are called for are a measurement, a management, and a movement that work with, not against, the pressures of floodwaters. Any attempt to be stronger than the river is a set-up for failure.

The other ecological services of continuous forest cover are: maintaining the high level of biodiversity, locking up a significant level of carbon, cooling the microclimate within the forest that reduces many of the temperature fluxes, providing for the collection and utilization of non-timber forest products, and for ecotourism. Sub-catchment deforestation results in soil loss and increased sediment loading in river sources that, through displacement of water and channel blockage with the development of sand banks, increase the opportunity for localized flooding. Such soil loss from deforested uplands turned to agriculture with little effective soil and water conservation, results in major plumes of clay and deposition of sediment particularly in coastal bays and inlets, is detrimental to reefs and coastal habitats. There are also the ecological services of swamp and estuary ecosystems that serve as the natural systems for managing floodwaters. Land reclamation runs the risk of major defeat where such areas are seen as waste lands and not valued for this further ecological service.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in the United States this year (2005), what we witnessed was an environmental disaster compounded by engineering hubris, a lack of governance, and a denial of widespread social poverty. Hurricane Katrina shows the blind spot in US national management and accountability, both in the lack of preparedness for disaster management, and the long term denial and neglect of people. The impact was a national disaster (many said ‘waiting to happen') that raised major questions about the gap between local people and national and even local government; and why local people were not participating in the welfare and governance of the area. Generally, local poverty is only raised to the level of a national disaster when a climatic or geological event brings the vulnerability of the poor to the fore.

Such disasters in developed countries show the fundamental importance of paying attention to local communities, having effective local governance, and working internationally to overcome the sufferings of others while learning to reduce risks on a global level. Too often, global is understood as that which operates at the highest international level and is furthest from people. But global here is taken for the universality and commonality of people's experience throughout the world. Hurricane Katrina's impact has international consequences and strengthens the argument against
purely national control that can lead to neglect and the need for global focus on vulnerability and eradication of world poverty - from the top and from the bottom.