Sustainable Urban Delta: The Inspiration to PRD through the Comparative Analysis of Netherlands Reclamation History

Due to the significant demand for land resources and rapid urbanization, reclamation has become one of the essential choices for developing coastal cities. However, the intensive reclamation projects lead to the high vulnerability of the delta. Attention to the general discussion of ecological security, vulnerability, and sustainability has proliferated in recent years, but insufficient attention has been paid to a detailed explanation of the specific human activities' impact on the overall delta from a narrative historical aspect. In this article, the Deltas of Netherlands and Pearl River Delta (PRD) in multiple scales are selected as cases. The two deltas share similarities in geography, physical system description, ecological system, management Issues, and human activities. The comparative analysis offers a means to improve the understanding of mechanisms for addressing ecological vulnerability by comparing two deltas in social and environmental aspects.The analysis section elaborates the similar reclamation history of two deltas by the sequence of three stages. By comparing the diverse responses of respective projects in macroscale and microscale with similar morphological and ecological features, it is effortless to improve the understanding of reactive mechanisms of systems, which directly affect the vulnerability index. The Vulnerability index will also be listed and elaborated corresponding to the historical stages. Moreover, successful examples of the Netherlands show the advanced experiments in guild thinking, governance, strategies. Thus, the comparative analysis provides comprehensive syntheses, mechanistic insights, and feasible alternatives to PRD. And beneficial guidance to develop a sustainable urban delta could be proposed.