Climate Change Challenges in a Sinking City, with Johan Verlinde, City of Rotterdam, Netherlands

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcast, in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from around the globe. My name is Piers Clark, and today my guest is Johan Verlinde, the program manager for climate change at the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
[00:00:19] Piers Clark: Johan, brilliant to have you with us.
[00:00:21] Johan Verlinde: Thank you so much, Piers.
[00:00:23] Piers Clark: We always start with learning a little bit about our speaker, so let's understand how you got into the role you are in now. What did you study, and what roles have you undertaken to get to where you are today?
[00:00:35] Johan Verlinde: I studied Civil Engineering in Delft with a master's on hydrology and urban water management, and actually right after I graduated, I started working for the City of Rotterdam in different roles, always related to water or climate adaptation, and always with a international side to it.
[00:00:55] Johan Verlinde: So it's always working on Rotterdam, but also working on a global level, learning from other cities and sharing our knowledge. And since 2019, I'm the program manager for climate adaptation for Rotterdam.
[00:01:08] Piers Clark: Excellent. An engineer that's been a public servant for his whole career. And you've been in this role now for six years, so the honeymoon period's over.
[00:01:16] Johan Verlinde: Yes, six years.
[00:01:18] Piers Clark: Brilliant. Let's now talk about the city of Rotterdam. For people who aren't aware, let's talk about where it is, how many people it serves, what sort of infrastructure it's got.
[00:01:28] Johan Verlinde: Rotterdam is the second biggest city of the Netherlands. We have a population of around 650,000 people. We are a very diverse city. We always say that almost all nationalities are living in Rotterdam.
[00:01:41] Johan Verlinde: We're a port city, home to the biggest ports in Europe, which is good for the economy of Rotterdam and the whole Netherlands. We are also a delta city, so we are the lowest lying city in the Netherlands. Parts of our city is minus seven meters below sea level, and a lot of the rivers for Western Europe eventually end up in Rotterdam.
[00:02:00] Johan Verlinde: We have a lot of challenges with rainwater and also with river water and seawater because 15% of our city is above sea level and 85% of the city is below sea level. So climate adaptation is quite a thing in Rotterdam already for decades just to keep our city dry.
[00:02:17] Piers Clark: It's wonderful 'cause that was the core fact that I wanted us to be sharing. You are on the delta and a bit of the city's already seven meters below sea level.
[00:02:26] Piers Clark: The city is protected by dykes, one assumes. Who's responsible for maintaining those dykes?
[00:02:31] Johan Verlinde: The governance of water management in the Netherlands is quite interesting. So we have the national government that is responsible for the primary flood defenses, so the dunes and the storm surge barriers.
[00:02:42] Johan Verlinde: Then we have the water authorities in the Netherlands, which also a political entity with elections, and they are responsible for the secondary defenses. So more or less the dykes in the city. Then we as a city are responsible for the stormwater and also other aspects of climate adaptation. So it's really a shared responsibility among different public entities, and you also pay taxes to all of those.
[00:03:06] Piers Clark: You said that the water utilities are subject to the sort of political whims. Can you just unpick that for me a bit more?
[00:03:13] Johan Verlinde: Yeah, so it's always said that water authorities are the first democratic entities in the Netherlands. Even before there were elections for city councils, and they are based on the polder system in the Netherlands. In Rotterdam, we actually have three water authorities and there are elections for them, but it's all about keeping the city dry, keeping the city protected.
[00:03:35] Piers Clark: Excellent. Now let's talk about what some of the challenges are that you're facing, aside from the fact that you are below sea level and with climate change, the sea levels are rising, so that problem is only getting compounded.
[00:03:47] Johan Verlinde: Yeah, true. So Rotterdam is a low lying city. At the same time, also part of our city is built on peat soil, so we are already low lying and we are still thinking. So that is quite a challenge. But as you already mentioned, we are very well protected from the sea and the river by storm surge barriers and dykes.
[00:04:07] Johan Verlinde: But at the same time, the rainfall also falls on the other side of the dike in the city. And the problem for Rotterdam is that we don't have a lot of surface water in our city. So storage during heavy rainfall is quite a challenge.
[00:04:20] Johan Verlinde: We used to have a lot of canals in Rotterdam. If you walk to Rotterdam, you'll see that a lot of our main streets end with the word "singel". "Singel" is a Dutch word for canal. And in the beginning of the 20th century, our city council decided to transform Rotterdam from a water city into a car city 'cause they saw the cities in the United States.
[00:04:40] Piers Clark: Rather than capping the canals, they actually filled them in. Did they?
[00:04:43] Johan Verlinde: They filled them in, yes. So there is also no water underneath the surface or underneath the road. So there's really a lack of storage capacity in our city center and the surrounding neighborhoods.
[00:04:55] Johan Verlinde: We have around 1,100 pumping stations to pump the water to higher grounds, and eventually to the wastewater treatment plant, which you can imagine with shifting rainfall patterns and heavy rainfall. Our system cannot cope with that. So we really are working on storing water everywhere we can, retaining the water, slowing down the water.
[00:05:14] Johan Verlinde: And what you also see is that the last decade, there's really a shift because we were always working on too much water. Now droughts and heat is becoming a challenge also for Rotterdam.
[00:05:25] Johan Verlinde: So where we were used to storing the water and getting rid of it as soon as possible. We are now also thinking about circular ways to reuse the rainwater in the city. We are also transforming the city from a car city back into a green water city at the moment.
[00:05:40] Piers Clark: It's quite an interesting challenge for you, isn't it? You are a city that's already below sea level and you are sinking because of the soils you are on, and you've now got intense rain coming with pumping stations that I suspect are struggling to deal with the very intense rains. It's different to what it was when those pumping stations were built. And you then got the added issue that when it's not raining, it's usually the middle of a drought and you haven't actually got any water and you haven't got any surface water to manage.
[00:06:08] Piers Clark: Alright, now let's talk through some of the solutions. You said you were looking at how you could slow down the water and trap it. So I assume we are talking about sustainable drainage type solutions. Let's talk about what you've done.
[00:06:21] Johan Verlinde: The way we look at climate adaptation and our solutions for climate adaptation is always about multi-functionality.
[00:06:28] Johan Verlinde: So the things we have implemented the last decade is first of all, the concept of the water squares. There are a lot of squares in Rotterdam that are usually very dull, paved with gray pavements and not really attractive. We need to do something on the looks of our public space, and that's also an opportunity to maybe add water storage to that.
[00:06:47] Johan Verlinde: We have 10 of these around the city, so it's just a square where water can be stored, but at the same time, it serves other functions. So we have a big one in the city center. It's used for sports, for BMXing. There's also a church near that square that do services in the water retention area when it's on a sunny Sunday.
[00:07:05] Johan Verlinde: And when it's raining, water can be stored in there for 24 hours and it really reduces the stress on the sewer system. And then we pump it dry again, or even infiltrates the water to the groundwater. We also have a huge water storage combined with a parking garage in the city center. We had a lack of parking spaces in the city center, so we also build the 10,000 cubic meters of water storage together with the parking garage.
[00:07:30] Johan Verlinde: You have a lot of functions on that square. It's more attractive and it's used way better by the people living there.
[00:07:37] Piers Clark: Brilliant. I love that innovation of taking community spaces and turning them into dual purpose storage tanks.
[00:07:43] Piers Clark: Now I'm curious, how much volume do you think you've been able to accommodate through this? 'Cause I one assumes building one water square isn't gonna have any real impact. Does 10 have a tangible impact or do you really need 300 of them?
[00:07:56] Johan Verlinde: I think we need every square and every street to have water storage in them, because, as you mentioned, to have a real impact in the city. We need those storages everywhere.
[00:08:07] Johan Verlinde: And this big water square, it has a storage capacity of 1,600 cubic meters. The parking garage, 10,000 cubic meters. That's actually a lot, but still we need more and we see that we cannot fix it all in the public space. That's also a challenge because only 40% of the city is public space and 60% is private space with already built environment or new development. So we also working together with building owners and real estate developers to make sure that also those buildings retain the water.
[00:08:39] Piers Clark: And that's a regulatory planning control issue that you are putting in place?
[00:08:44] Johan Verlinde: Yes. So for new developments, if you are developing in Rotterdam, you need to be able to store a 50 millimeter rain event on your development.
[00:08:54] Johan Verlinde: So based on the total area you're developing, that means you have the total volume you have to store. We don't tell those real estate developers how they need to do it. We motivate them to incorporate them in their design, so green facades, green roofs, et cetera. We already see that happening now that you will get really interesting buildings that are also storing water in a good way.
[00:09:18] Piers Clark: I love it, that set the rule of what your outcome wants to be, but leaving people freedom to be innovative and build something that will actually add value to their sales pitch.
[00:09:28] Piers Clark: Now, how much does it cost to make a car park that's dual purpose? How much extra does it cost to put in 50 millimeters of storage when you've got a private development?
[00:09:37] Johan Verlinde: For the water square, it has 1,600 cubic meters of water storage with a total cost of 4.5 million euros for the total redesign implementation of the water square. But at the same time, we also added green to the square. We made it more attractive, more useful. And it's not only Euros that go to water retention, but it also serves a lot of other functions.
[00:10:03] Johan Verlinde: So it's hard to just tell, okay, one cubic meter is 1500 euros, so to say. You have to see it in the bigger picture.
[00:10:12] Piers Clark: Okay, how's it gone down? How do the public respond? Are people complaining that their taxes are too high and they think that these are superfluous assets? Or are the residents of Rotterdam supportive of what you've been doing?
[00:10:24] Johan Verlinde: So the thing is with those water squares and also other climate adaptive measures, we started designing it together with the citizens. So in a really early stage, we invited those citizens to design the square with us. So we knew that we needed reservoirs, but we didn't know what kind of functions would be useful for the people living there.
[00:10:44] Johan Verlinde: So we invited them, it was done together with De Urbanisten, a landscape architecture firm in Rotterdam. They designed a game which the people living in the area could play, and that ultimately decided what kind of functions needed to be incorporated in the design. So it's really also the design of the people.
[00:11:03] Piers Clark: And people actually got into the game playing, or was it just the school kids?
[00:11:07] Johan Verlinde: Everyone. We invited people living there and working there, and they all came to design it together with us. Now you see that every water square looks completely different because every neighborhood or everyone wants something else.
[00:11:20] Piers Clark: That's because they own it. You play to the tribalism that naturally comes with human communities. "My water square's so much better than yours."
[00:11:28] Piers Clark: Johan, we're coming to the end of our time together, unfortunately, but it's been wonderful hearing about the example of what's been going on in Rotterdam. This, engaging with the communities and finding innovative ways to create storage. Of course, it's an existential threat for the city of Rotterdam because of the circumstance you are in, but I think the examples you shared there are definitely once it could be copied elsewhere.
[00:11:50] Piers Clark: Now, we always like to finish with a slightly cheeky question, and that is to invite you to go back 20 years. Imagine that you could time travel back and you could see a young Johan Verlinde. What advice would you give him?
[00:12:03] Johan Verlinde: That's a tough question, but I think act more by your heart than overthink everything because that's really what bothered me the last couple of years that I over rationalized everything and it stopped me sometimes from acting.
[00:12:17] Johan Verlinde: I always thought that I wasn't able to present anything or to be a public speaker, and then I just started doing it and it gave me a lot of energy. So doing more by heart than overthinking would be my advice to the young Johan.
[00:12:32] Piers Clark: Wonderful. You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, piers Clark, and my guest today has been Johan Linde from the city of Rotterdam, where every day he gets up and thinks about how to protect the city from climate change.
[00:12:47] Piers Clark: Hope you can join us next time. Thank you.