Cooperating on climate adaptation in the North Sea region

11 July 2017 - Published by Eric Boessenkool

At the North Sea Conference the projects Building with Nature and FAIR organized a workshop for all projects related to climate change within the Interreg North Sea Region. The aim was to explore whether the projects could cooperate more. Roeland Allewijn, Director of Safety and Water at Rijkswaterstaat (NL), gave a keynote speech. After that he facilitated a workshop in which the projects presented and discussed with each other their common interests.

Apart from the projects Building with Nature and FAIR he following projects took part in the workshop: BEGIN, FRAMES and TOPSOIL. These five projects are mutually linked to each other and agreed to work towards an overall program for climate change adaptation. In doing so, they will seek a connection with, among other things, the Dutch National Knowledge and Innovation Program for Water and Climate. Two recently acclaimed INTERREG projects have indicated that they would like to join the program:

Catch: a project on the effects of climate change in small cores.
Canape: this project is concerned with the effects of climate change in peat areas.

Social added value
The projects realize that they won’t make it with technical solutions alone. The technique has to work, but users must also be able to use them efficiently. In addition, both the workplace and management must endorse its importance. An important aspect is therefore to uniformly identify the social added value of the measures. This allows users to get hard data about soft values like recreation and nature. This gives users insight into the various benefits within the projects so they can make a correct decision. By working together, we want to put together the issue of climate change and provide overarching solutions.