Water for agriculture in peri-urban delta areas is vital to safeguard sustainable food production. Due to dynamics of urbanisation in deltas and climate change, water availability (drought and flood) is becoming erratic and farmers cannot rely only on their own experience anymore to plan farming operations. This research aims to develop tailor made water information services with and for farmers in peri-urban areas in the urbanising deltas of Accra, Ghana and Khulna, Bangladesh to contribute to water and food security in river deltas. This will be done by 1) combining new developments in internet and mobile technology with latest insights on knowledge sharing; 2) integrating weather model results with observations of groundwater trends and river discharges; and 3) attuning knowledge about adaptive decision making and enabling governance structures to local situations. These insights will be used to co-create and test water information services, consisting of knowledge sharing platforms and virtual communities. Enabled by NWO seed money, the consortium has organised workshops with key actors (farmers, governance actors and ICT professionals) in both areas. These stakeholders have contributed to this proposal and are committed to engage in the proposed research and innovation process. The co-production of water information services with local farmers will contribute to: livelihood improvement, empower small/medium farmers and build capacity for enhancing sustainable food production. Furthermore it will result in a business case by delivering design principles for viable farmer-oriented water information services in other urban-rural delta zones in the developing world.

This project will develop a conceptual framework for analysing deltas as highly interdependent humanwater systems to examine the interplay between hydrological (flooding, riverbank erosion, waterlogging) and social processes (demographic shifts, urbanization processes, governance) in the urbanizing delta of Bangladesh and the urbanized delta of the Netherlands. Obvious differences aside, both countries are involved in long-term climate change-induced system planning in dynamic deltas. The project will acknowledge the dynamic interactions and feedback loops between demographic and physical changes, urban processes, mobility and flood risk. This advanced understanding will be used to: shift existing simplifying policy discourse on climate refugees and negative perceptions of urban migration; improve the implementation and coordination between existing policies; reduce vulnerability for migrants and support sustainable pro-poor development approaches in Bangladesh; increase flood resilience in the Netherlands and Bangladesh. A trans-disciplinary research approach will work at the interface between social science and hydrological science to question key assumptions regarding the one-way processes of environmental and climate migration now guiding urban DRR and delta policies and dominating the media. The research will also work at the policy/research interface to inform policy discourse and raise awareness of policy makers and planners in regards to the linkages between demographic and hydrological flows, and the impacts of this relationship on existing plans and policies. The project will include two PhD studies based on coordinated fieldwork primarily in Bangladesh that will focus on understanding how the interactions and feedbacks between water and human systems impact on DRR strategies and urban development, and vice versa. It will pay particular attention to ways in which governance processes in both physical disaster sites and host locations affect migration and human interventions, which will (in turn) affect the physical environment. A post-doctoral position will combine the empirical data and the outcomes of the two PhD studies to: explore how demographic transitions in southwest Netherlands impact Dutch flood management policies; develop a conceptual model for understanding flows of water and flows of people; examine how post-urbanisation trajectories such as that followed by the Netherlands may inform future planning elsewhere, with Bangladesh as a focus country. A third, overarching research programme to be carried out by the more senior consortium members and MSc students under their guidance, will integrate research findings from both the Netherlands and Bangladesh.