NWA-LOSS

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NWA-LOSS

Programme

Ongoing subsidence is a complex problem in the Dutch lowlands for cities and polder land. As subsidence proceeds, old strategies for coping with it reach bottom limits as they do not fix or remove the roots of the problem. The research programme NWA-LOSS (Living on Soft Soils, funded from the National Science Agenda) is ran by a broad consortium of research institutes and societal partners in the Netherlands. It strives to achieve three big things:

  1. To develop and test and arrange for new strategies to cope with land subsidence in low lands, where one lives on soft soils (technical, natural, governance, law, planning, participation, responding, public-private, in urban areas and in the country side).
  2. To develop and test and arrange for new strategies to cope with land subsidence in low lands, where one lives on soft soils (technical, natural, governance, law, planning, participation, responding, public-private, in urban areas and in the country side).
  3. As much as possible and societally achievable, reduce rates of land subsidence and greenhouse gas emissions in soft soil polder lands. In other words: mitigating land subsidence impacts as part of broad sustainability goals.

Living on Soft Soils

Many low-lying river deltas, home to over 500 million people, host vast areas of intensely used land surface that are subsiding due to natural causes and human-induced activities and releasing greenhouse gasses (GHG) in the process.

Land subsidence

Land subsidence, or soil subsidence, is the sinking or gradual downward settling of the ground’s surface. In the Netherlands, soil subsidence happens at scale due to water loss in peatlands and due to natural gas extraction.