While the influence of humans on nature is therefore a problem that is actively being addressed in the Netherlands and Belgium, tackling the pressure that nature is placing on humans has recently begun to acquire greater urgency. The Low

Countries have long been an area in which people have had to confront the challenges of living at, or below, sea level. The history of water management in the Netherlands can be dated back to around the ninth century, although it was not until the thirteenth century that its inhabitants began to make inroads against the sea and protect themselves from floods by living on dwelling mounds, or ‘terps’. Reclamation of peatlands in the west of the country also extended the area of land that could be inhabited, even if this resulted in a considerable drop in water levels, which in turn resulted in a sinking of soil levels in land in the polders. While a system of gates and sluices, dykes, polders and windmills (to power drainage activities) enabled people to tame the forces of nature, floods have regularly claimed many victims down the centuries: the St Elizabeth Flood of 1421 caused tens of thousands of fatalities. In the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century, extensive land reclamation took place, including the drainage of the extensive Haarlemmermeer, which would later become the home of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.