Assessing alternative discharge distributions at the Dutch Rhine Bifurcations to address climate change impacts by 2100

Climate change poses significant challenges to river systems. For the river Rhine, this means that the discharge variability is changing through more frequent and lower flows in the summer and more extreme discharge peaks in the winter (Buitink et<br/>al., 2023). This inevitably impacts functions humans allocated to rivers over the past century.<br/>In case of the Dutch Rhine system, river branches are heavily engineered through the<br/>construction of hydraulic structures to support multiple functions including providing conveyance capacity (i.e. flood safety), fresh water supply and navigation, as the Rhine is one of Europe major waterways. However, often these interventions were carried out with focussing on one specific river function in mind.<br/>All these human interventions, together with some high discharge events have also<br/>contributed to alterations in the river’s discharge (distribution) over the two bifurcations in the Netherlands.<br/>To understand how climate change affects future river functions in relation to each other, we aimed at defining performance indicators for each river function and to use these in a Multi Criteria Analysis to investigate the effects of climate<br/>change in the Dutch Rhine at a system scale.<br/>Additionally, we used this framework to compare alternative discharge distributions and large scale river widening measures to adapt for climate change.