Turning a colander into a sponge in Belgium

This year has been a very, very wet one. Spring 2024 was the wettest since measurements began in 1883. Rain has become all we talk about; we plan our social life around it. 

We exchange advice on raincoats that keep you dry but not sweaty (Uniqlo’s cotton-blend parka is the current favourite), and the weather radar app with the most accurate rain predictions (Buienradar, or “shower radar” in Dutch). Even the Royal Meteorological Institute issuing a code yellow for heavy rainfall, as it did when Storm Kirk raged through Europe a few weeks ago, feels like just another Tuesday.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. A few years ago, it looked as if we were on track for Mediterranean-like weather after a couple of freak summers. Belgium, with its famously dispiriting weather, was turning a new leaf. 

A historic wrong would be righted and we would become a country with balmy summers, while Spain and Italy would become insufferably hot and desert-like because they’d had it good for decades. So we bought fans and linen clothes, and tried to take shorter showers after headlines warned about water scarcity.

That all feels like a distant, heat-induced hallucination now. Because the last few months have made it depressingly clear that climate change isn’t going to give us warmer summer weather, or at least not only that. We will also be getting more rain. A lot more rain.

So, when I heard that an exhibition was opening focused on how the city is adapting to the more frequent and intense rain events, I decided to check it out, which is how I found myself wondering whether our tour guide was trolling us.

As she took us through the exhibition, spanning two of the small building’s floors, I learned that moving from the heart of the city to an outermost municipality, as I had recently done, was a very bad idea. Those of us living close to big, green expanses on the north-western and south-eastern edges of the city receive up to 124mm more rain per year than the city’s central neighbourhoods, for reasons that remain largely unclear. 

I learn that 20mm of rain in one day is considered heavy rainfall, and that we have been seeing more and more of those days in the last few decades due to climate change.

The tour guide delivers titbits like this in a matter-of-fact tone as we swiftly move from one display to the next.

“I realise this has been quite bleak, but now we are going to talk about solutions,” she said when we entered the exhibition’s final room, which focuses on the measures city officials have been putting in place to help the capital cope with the copious amounts of water that are in our future. These include green roofs, a programme of tree-planting, and porous parking spaces.

Our guide explained that our city is currently a colander and that it needs to become more like a sponge. She pointed to images illustrating two alternate visions of our city, our leaky present and our imagined, absorbent future. She then handed us a cardboard puzzle piece, each representing a different climate adaptation measure, and invited us to tack it on to a drawing of a fictitious neighbourhood.

The message seemed to be that adapting to this new reality is a bit like buying an Uniqlo jacket or downloading the best-reviewed weather app. This ignores the fact that the prospect of year-round rain might just crush every one of our spirits, as it did this spring.

I looked down at the piece in my hand and for a moment was tempted to throw it at our guide, telling her I didn’t want to live in this idealised, rain-resilient Brussels. But instead, I walked up to the display, put my puzzle piece on the image and decided to go to Uniqlo later that day.

Linda A Thompson is a Belgian journalist and editor living in Brussels