the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 04 Apr 2024
Current status of water-related planning for climate change adaptation in the Spree River basin, Germany
Abstract. Fuelled by climate change, low flows, heavy rain and flooding likely intensify in the future, adding to the pressures experienced by rivers in Western and Central Europe in recent decades. To meet these challenges, comprehensive water-related adaptation to climate change is indispensable. Based on the case study of the Spree River basin in Germany, this study analysed legally defined plans for water management, spatial and landscape planning for their current status of integrated climate change adaptation. To pre-structure the document analysis, eight water management fields of action for adaptation to climate change were identified using official recommendations for action. 39 % of the 28 plans analysed specify objectives and measures for adapting to climate change. Of these, 55 % address the diverse impacts of climate change in a more comprehensive way, including prevention and mitigation of droughts and floods, and protection of water ecosystems and groundwater resources. Filling these planning gaps may include more frequent updating of plans, greater focus on evidence from informal plans, multifunctional measures, and adaptation of best practice examples for systematic integration of climate change impacts and adaptation. Planning and implementing comprehensive climate change adaptation will strengthen the resilience of ecosystems and secure human livelihoods.
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RC1: 'Comment on nhess-2024-59', Anonymous Referee #1, 04 May 2024
The manuscript is well researched and written.
The boundaries shown in Fig. 1 imply that the German boundary to Poland and Czech Republic is a federal state boundary. In fact, these are national boundaries. You may add an additional class. In addition, the statement of map sources seems to be insufficient. This information should follow the utilisation permits of the data used - please prove.
A full stop is missing at the end of line 169
In Fig. 2 the symbol for federal state boundaries is hardly visible. Maybe use a rectangle with a dark background and a line of the corresponding colour in the center.
Line 222: Please prove the sentence, there is either a word missing (“and”) or a part of the sentence is left from editing.
Line 273: Fig. S2 should be named as table
For the paragraph starting at lne 274, but also in general: Maybe you could take use of the following UBA report: Entwicklung der ökologischen Beschaffenheit von Oberflächengewässern im Klimawandel - Wirkungsmechanismen, Modellierungsansätze und Handlungsempfehlungen zur Umsetzung der EG-WRRL https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/publikationen/entwicklung-der-oekologischen-beschaffenheit-von
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2024-59-RC1 -
AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Saskia Arndt, 06 May 2024
Thank you for your careful reading of our article and for your valuable comments. We agree with your suggestions for improvement and will take them all into account when revising the paper.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2024-59-AC1
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AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Saskia Arndt, 06 May 2024
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RC2: 'Comment on nhess-2024-59', Anonymous Referee #2, 05 May 2024
In the manuscript "Current status of water-related planning for climate change adaptation in the Spree River basin, Germany", the authors consider a set of formal plans covering the German Spree River Basin Region to explore the consideration of climate change, climate change impacts and adaptation measures in the plans. They present their results and discussions comprehensively. I would suggest a series of adjustments before approval.
1. Strengthen Purpose and Scope of Paper in introduction: The contextualization of the study is nicely done in the introduction. The indication of the scope and paper as part of the final paragraph could benefit from further elaboration. Both, the question of research gap and how this study addresses this gap and what can be learned from it, as well as the actual work should be addressed. For the latter, the authors might want to reuse lines 86 to 96 which seem out of context in the section on the case study and should either be moved to the introduction or the method section anyways.
2. Detailed information on case study area differences: In the later analysis, it is mentioned that some plans don't capture specific fields of action and information is provided on a sub-basin level (compare Figure 2). It could be beneficial to provide more context for these specific sub-basin areas as part of the case study description. This could help contextualize whether it it is an actual gap in all sub-basin areal plans if some of the fields of action are not considered. This study does not provide any context about the different requirements or settings of the sub-basin areas, which leaves the reader to estimate the 'goodness' of flood/drought planning at the sub-basin scale to the number of fields of action that are considered. I am aware that this might be out of the scope of this study, but mentioning/discussing it as part of the limitations would be valuable in that case. In any case, for readers not familiar with the German Spree river basin, it could be beneficial to adjust Figure 1 to show, which plans listed in Tab.2 capture which parts of the river basin area.
3. Methodology: The methodology is comprehensively explained. Two aspects might require additional attention: 1) The authors indicate in line 117 that some measures were excluded from the list without any elaboration on which measures and why. 2) Additional elaboration on the inclusion/exclusion criteria would be beneficial: a) it seems that here the authors should also mention that planning statements were also excluded when they did not (explicitly?) refer to the German Spree river basin. b) It is unclear how authors define whether a statement 'is described in the context of climate change adaptation or climate change and its (potential) impacts'. Is it when these terms are used, or referring to the consequence (e.g. shifts in flow regimes) or to future uncertainty or to something else?
4. The results and discussion section are well written, and informative. Depending on any clarifications in the introduction section as suggested in my first comment, it would be beneficial to consider the structure in the discussion section. Additionally, one minor point of attention could be that currently the limitations of the study are presented as a subsection following this statement in the introductory paragraph of the discussion section: "Therefore, the subsequent sections elaborate on opportunities to improve the integration of climate change adaptation into planning instruments that treat water management issues".
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2024-59-RC2 -
AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Saskia Arndt, 06 May 2024
Thank you for your thorough review of our paper. We would like to take your helpful comments into account when revising the paper as follows:
Regarding 1, we will revise the last paragraph of the introduction as noted, and more clearly explain the scope and objective of the study. We will also take into account the paragraph from lines 86 to 96. However, we do not consider it appropriate to include some of the information in this paragraph in the Introduction, as the German planning system has not yet been explained in the Introduction and we do not assume that an international readership has this background knowledge. However, we will better integrate the paragraph in chapter "2.2 Water-related planning"
Regarding 2: In chapter "2.1 Spree River basin and its water management challenges", we have already briefly mentioned the different conditions of the Spree River basin along the course of the river. Despite this heterogeneity, the UBA report "Klimawirkungs- und Risikoanalyse 2021 für Deutschland" (Climate Impact and Risk Analysis 2021 for Germany) by Kahlenborn et al. (2021) shows that the Spree River basin will be affected by climate change in a very similar way. On p. 90, Fig. 10 shows that according to their cluster analysis the Spree River basin is mainly located in the "Klimaraumtypen" (climate types) "Wärmste Region" (warmest region) and "Trockenste Region" (driest region) and that the climate impacts are expected to be very similar across the entire river basin.
Nonetheless, it is true that we have not looked closely at how the sub-regions explicitly differ and what different climate adaptation needs can be derived accordingly. For this reason, we would like to include the UBA study mentioned above at least as a partial justification in the paper and point out in the limitations that a more detailed analysis of the sub-regions is required in order to be able to draw concrete conclusions for the individual sub-regions. In particular, this would also require a look at the regional planning and landscape plans at municipal level. However, this would go beyond the scope of this study, because the aim of this study was to provide an initial overview of the current status of climate adaptation in water-related and legally defined plans in the Spree River basin.
We also plan to include a figure in the supplements that shows the spatial location of the 28 plans analysed. Unfortunately, this is not possible in Figure 1 because too many planning areas overlap. More than one map is needed to show the planning areas of the plans in a comprehensible way.
Regarding 3, we take your comments into account and explain in more detail why some measures from the LAWA report were excluded from the analysis. We also clarify once again in the methodology that, although care was taken to only consider statements that relate to the Spree River basin, this could not always be fully ensured. This is also mentioned in chapter "5.6 Limitations of the methodological approach". We will also go into more detail in the methodology to emphasise that we have only included a planning statement in the analysis if it is specifically described as an objective or measure for adaptation to climate change and its impacts in the plan.
Regarding 4, we thank you for the comment and will also indicate in the introductory paragraph of the discussion that the discussion concludes with a section describing the limitations of this study.
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AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Saskia Arndt, 06 May 2024
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