Water as Leverage Waddensea - Trilateral conference, Wilhelmshaven, December 2022

Water as Leverage – Wadden Sea explores what the Water as Leverage approach could mean for the Wadden Sea, with local cases in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. We have been working on a Call for Action in the Waddensea, using the Water as Leverage approach. In this light, we set sail for Wilhelmshaven in Germany to join the 14th Trilateral Conference of the Waddensea on 28 and 29 November 2022, bringing together Denmark, The Netherlands and Germany.

For this conference, we were invited to co-organise a working session to introduce the approach together with Deltares, Programma Rijke Waddenzee and the Dutch Enterprise Agency. In this working session, we discussed the added value of a pre-design phase mapping the insights of local actors in an integral way, and how it led to the recognition of the same clusters of challenges across the coastal region and its islands. The next day we got to go in depth into the challenges of the Danish cases of Fanø, Esbjerg and Ribe.

The coming months we will implement the results of these two days in our document ‘Setting the Scene for a call for action for climate adaptation in the Waddensea’ which will literally set the scene for design teams to support the project definition of the different cases. 

The ‘Setting the Scene’ document will explain the Water as Leverage methodology – previously applied to enhance sustainable transformation on the Asian coast –, go deeper into the specific context of the Waddensea, and present seven cases in The Netherlands (Texel, Terschelling and Harlingen), Germany (Emden), and Denmark (Fanø, Esbjerg and Ribe) for which the Water as Leverage-approach can be re-interpreted.

‘Setting the Scene for a call for action for climate adaptation in the Waddensea’ is expected to be published in the beginning of 2023.

More News