VUB professor Marijke Huysmans is no longer a lone voice in the wilderness. Governments and citizens are increasingly aware of the dangerous drought affecting us. As a scientific expert who passionately tells the general public about her field of groundwater hydrology, this is a relief. “But we still have a very long way to go.”
You are a nuanced messenger of bad tidings: drought is looming. How difficult is that as a scientist?
I try to deliver a positive message and focus mainly on how we can become more resilient to drought. Often the media reporting and interviewing me are alarmist. It's in their nature: drama sells news. A dry summer quickly becomes apocalyptic, a flood a deluge. I believe in solutions, I’m an engineer.
You say there is enough water in Belgium, but that we need to use it better. How can we do that?
Climate change brings the threat of not only drought but also flooding. We need to prepare for both extremes. Fortunately, the solutions are not contradictory. We expect less precipitation in spring and summer and more in winter. On an annual basis, we have enough water. And we don’t expect the amount of water to decrease in the future.
So we need to store that excess water in winter for drier periods. This can be done in many ways: for instance, by collecting rainwater to flush toilets with, or by building water reservoirs to irrigate land. But the best place to store large amounts of water is under our feet.
How do you store water underground?
Nature does it for us. Rain seeps into the soil and is stored there. But we haven’t made the most of that system. The ground is paved with buildings and roads, so water cannot infiltrate the subsoil. Our landscape is also designed with drainage, ditches and sewers so that water is drained as quickly as possible.
We have lots of tools to fix that. In agriculture, for instance, we have smarter drainage. We can also create natural water buffers that capture surplus in the wet seasons and use it in the dry. On a small scale, you can create streams that hold the water. On the VUB campus, we have wadis, or drainage courses, which can temporarily store rainwater so it can slowly infiltrate the soil. In this way, they replenish the groundwater reserves.
We also need to learn to use water sparingly. People and companies have already started to do this in earnest, but we still have a very long way to go. We haven’t seen water as a scarce resource for a very long time.
To what extent has awareness of water issues grown?
It has increased tremendously. Five years ago, we were almost laughed at. But the droughts have opened people’s eyes. A lot of things are moving and politicians have also woken up. In Flanders, for example, we have the Blue Deal, a plan to make Flanders more resilient to water scarcity and drought. It contains more than 70 actions and 400 projects But we are not there yet: it’s a long-term project.