 We come to the second keynote speech for today's introductory session. Thanks for the nice discussion. We will provide you with a first-time presentation. And we are extremely happy that we can have our second keynote speaker here in person because we're not quite sure that he's in the Netherlands these days. And thank you, Simon, for being available, for joining us here today. So Simon Witte is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and actually he's a professor for Germanic languages and literatures. So I wonder, why are we getting now a German language literature professor here? So you can see how Paul we go and throw it out in the water. But actually, Simon is a real example of the plural of culture and many interests. So he is not only a professor in Germanic languages. He's also a general at the Pan Institute for Urban Research. He is in the board of the Water Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He's affiliated with programs in cinema studies, environmental humanities, and gender sexuality and women's studies. So a very, very broad spoke his covering. Looking at water more specifically, his research and teaching concerns the cultural dimensions of climate change, adaptation, resilience, and sustainability in general. And he's also engaged in activities that go beyond the pure academic or traditional academic scholarship research and teaching, but also involves more activism, urban design, and caring at different projects that are going through the environment. He has a current ongoing project that looks at how Delta cities are responding to and planning for sea level rise in Germany, in the Netherlands, but also in the US and in Indonesia. And the project very much focuses on that response is to sea level rise, but how they are taken up in different countries and in an intercultural context. So that links also, again, to questions of colonial and post-coloniality, because many of the places he's looking at share this past. In this year, actually, he also started a project on a YouTube project called the Geister with a YouTube, yeah, very new forms of storytelling and creative ideas around water and making animated videos. So we will also learn about this in the next 45 minutes, one hour that we can start. Simon, welcome to my interview. All right, so it's incredibly thrilling for me to be here. So excited. I love this institution, IHE. I love the fact that you are here. Congratulations for being here, for making this a part of your life journey to come here. I called my talk Room for Ambivalence. You just heard a brilliant talk by Amit. Fantastic questions and comments. And I'm going to guess that you might agree with me that there's a lot of ambivalence in the room. There's a lot of ambivalence in being here in Delfts, and being here in the Netherlands, being here in Europe, and being in the midst of the climate emergency as we are and reading the IBCC report that came out in August. There's loads and loads of ambivalence. Usually people are very uncomfortable with being ambivalent. It's not really a great place to be. You'd much rather be in a certain place and know. But I think we need to make room for ambivalence. We need to acknowledge that it's there. We need to do something with our ambivalence. Now, the way I approach things is through humor. I think humor is a great way to approach difficult, controversial, uncomfortable things. If you do it in a respectful way, humor is in a respectful way, in a caring way, the way that cares for the other person as well, not to harm or to hurt, but actually to help and to heal and to get beyond something. That's what I think humor can do. And that's sort of what I try to do as well. I've really enjoyed listening to Amit and learning from Amit. We had a conversation a week ago or so in preparation for this, and it seemed to me that we would make a great tag team. There are things that he can say and did say that I can't say. I'm so glad that he said it and you responded to it. There are things that I can say, and I think actually that's exactly what I want to do. I've called the subtitle this a practical guide to managing your relationship with the Dutch. You all are here for 18 months or so, the midst of the Netherlands. They're Dutch people around you. You're going to interact with them in all kinds of ways. Of course, you're here because the Dutch do have a lot to teach, to give with regard to water in all kinds of ways. There's so much that you can learn from them. I think I'll just get started here. I say it a lot, actually. The Dutch are amazing, right? I mean, there's something that's pretty amazing about the things that they've done. Let's just look at some of their greatest hits. There's the Afsar Dag, that 32 kilometer long dike that closed off or dam that closed off the Zerderzee, the Zijderzee from the North Sea and transformed a body of salt water into a body of fresh water over time, bringing all kinds of environmental issues and destroying fisheries and ways of life and blah, blah, blah, all those things too. But it was quite an accomplishment. The Eastern Shelter Storm Search Barrier, probably not, but you will probably have a chance to see this. I've been there many times, actually. And I could start crying as I think about being there right now. This piece of engineering moves me to tears. It's crazy. I cannot explain why a professor of literature is moved to tears by being there, but I am. I see this thing. And I just am astonished by it. There's a really interesting story that goes along with this. Dutch love to tell their water story. The story is more complicated than it seems. But there was an idea here that I think was important at the moment that this was completed. 1986 is where I was completed. It protects so many people. That's, I think, what really moves me. So I see that and I realize how many people it protects. There's the Maaslaan Storm Search Barrier. I cry when I see this one, too. This one's closer by. They'll see this probably sooner. This is in Rotterdam. And that's also just an astonishing Storm Search Barrier, just extraordinary to see. They close it once a year to test it out. I think, is it? When did they do that? I think maybe it just was or it's coming at any rate. Yeah, maybe you have a chance to see it. That might be something. I think it should be a much bigger celebration. Then there's Room for the River, which is in Nijmegen, nearby, or not nearby, always way. And it varies points along these rivers that course through the southern part of the country. Now you know where I got my title from, right? Room for ambivalence, Room for the River. I'm using that same kind of hydrological thinking for dealing with our ambivalence about the Dutch. Then there's Del Tires right nearby doing absolutely amazing work at all kinds of fields. And they have this incredible research facility. They're floating, right? There are floating neighborhoods around. This one is called Sconeskip. It's in Amsterdam. It is, they claim, the most sustainable floating neighborhood within Europe. Yeah. It has a circular economy. It uses renewable energy. They share. They do all kinds of interesting things. You might want to see it. And so that's one of their experiments, which is floating. Then they're also doing experiments in floating on a much larger scale, anticipating, possibly, that this might be a solution, one part, one component of adapting to higher sea levels. This is at the Maritime Research Institute with the Netherlands in Wageningen. And this is together with Blue 21, which is based in Delft. Maybe you'll get a chance to meet with her. He's a really, really great guy. And he has so many amazing ideas about floating, not just floating neighborhoods or floating architecture. In this case, a floating energy complex with renewable energy, wind and solar and so on. But he can imagine floating city annexes, for instance, and so on. And anyway, the Dutch tell themselves this, and they tell everyone, they are amazing. They'll tell you that. And something that goes along with that is that there's a chance, and it's pretty high chance, that certain kind of arrogance goes along with that. If U21, which is based in Delft, maybe you'll get a chance to meet with her. He's a really, really great guy. And he has so many amazing ideas about floating, not just floating neighborhoods or floating architecture. In this case, a floating energy complex with renewable energy, wind and solar and so on. But he can imagine floating city annexes, for instance, and so on. And anyway, the Dutch tell themselves this, and they tell everyone, they are amazing. They'll tell you that. And something that goes along with that is that there's a chance, and it's pretty high chance, that certain kind of arrogance goes along with that. If U tell everybody you're amazing and everybody tells you back that you're amazing, you start to think that you're the one should be doing the speaking and everybody should be doing the listening. Everybody else should be doing the listening. There's a kind of arrogance that sets in. And then the ways that they kind of modulate that arrogance, they might say things like, even in the Netherlands, we have that problem. But even in saying it in that way, you know that that comes from a position of arrogance. It's like, you're describing a problem, an issue of something you're dealing with and they say, even in the Netherlands, we have to deal with that, but we have a solution for it. Okay, so I call that polar arrogance. And I think you're going to encounter it in one form or another. It's good to know that it's there because you can use humor and other ways as well to not exactly to combat it, but to deal with it, maybe to disarm it, maybe to get around it, maybe in fact, as you can see from point six, maybe you'll be able to help them acquire a kind of polar humility, which I think would be a really, really good thing. So that's what we're sort of aiming for. Okay, so what I want to do today with you is just run through a few things that the Dutch don't want you to know. And I think that that's going to help you in developing a sort of a position, it's not an attitude, it's really a position from which to confront, deal with polar arrogance. If it presents itself, you'll be able to confront it and counter it on this basis. So these are things that Dutch don't want you to know. Okay, the first one is the M word. Anyone ever guess as to what the M word is? Money. No, yeah, it's the M word, it is an M word, but in Dutch it would be the G word there, right? It'd be kept, but it's the M word. Money. Meets? Meets. Meets, oh, egoism, is that what you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe, yeah, meat too, yeah, yeah. I'm thinking mitigation, mitigation. I think of everything I do, I start from the time of emergency, right? Everything. But most everything I start there. And mitigation, we usually care up with, or opposed to, there's adaptation, right? And there's an ongoing record for it about mitigation, adaptation, etc. And you probably have figured out where you are on that. The Dutch don't, I generalize a lot here and you know I shouldn't do that. I know I shouldn't do that. I should be, every time I say to Dutch, you should hear many Dutch people, okay? Not a Dutch, but many Dutch people. Okay, so many Dutch people don't like to hear the word mitigate, right? Because mitigation means reducing carbon emissions. And the Dutch say, basically, we don't want to mitigate, we want to adapt and we want to sell our adaptation technology to all of you all so that we can make more of the other and make more money. We'll get to that, okay? So this is what they don't want you to know. This is share of renewable energy. Look where they are, they're at the bottom. You know, take a good look at the Dutch economy, what it runs on. Fossil fuels are absolutely crucial to this economy in so many ways. And the renewals are not ramping up. Who creates Dutch energy policy? Is it the government? No, it is in fact, Orgenda. You heard of Orgenda, Orgenda? The Dutch climate case? Sounds like the Dutch, oh yeah, we have a climate case. No, this was an organization that sued the Dutch government for not being ambitious enough in its energy policy and reducing carbon emissions. And then won, and it surprised the whole world. And then what did the Dutch government do? They appealed. They didn't say, oh yeah, okay, we'll take your, no, they appealed. And it went all the way up to the Supreme Court just quite recently. And the Supreme Court lectured the Dutch government and said, you have to do this. It's in the constitution, principle of care. Look at this, Dutch energy policy comes from a small group that sues the government and a very great lawyer. He's right here, you can hardly see him. Roger Cox, brilliant guy. Marianne Minnesma right here, brilliant woman. Amazing, she's really the motor of this. Fantastic, I walked with her two days ago from Kota to Rotterdam on the climate miles for Orgenda, Chief Brilliant. But look at two, Dutch energy policy, donate now. We have to donate in order to press the Dutch government to do something about this. Okay, there's Shell, same lawyer, different group. Roger Cox, milieu, defense, friends of the earth. They sued Shell, Rotterdam Shell. And they judges found in their favor as well. Shell has changed some things. They sold off some assets. That in the US, but they're appealing as well, right? So Dutch energy policy is driven by lawsuits by a very small group. You would think maybe that many Dutch people think that Orgenda is great and love Orgenda. You would be wrong, you don't like them. And here started my room. Okay, this really, really gets me. I understand it, but I really don't understand it. The Netherlands was created with windmills. We all know that, right? The windmills pumped the water up and out and dried out the folders and blah, blah. And you would think that a country that owes its existence to windmills would embrace new windmills, windmills 2.0. They hate many Dutch people, hate those windmills and they do not want them. That's funny, but it makes me really, really angry. I do not understand it for a minute. I really do not. This is serious. We're in a climate emergency and the Dutch are saying, not a windmail, I don't want to see it. I don't want to travel through the Netherlands and see a windmill. I don't want to be on the beach and see a windmill. I just don't want any windmills and they will come up with, all right, anyways, all right. All right, this has actually led to the formation, not this alone, but that's politics, long story. There's so many parties and they keep on forming new parties. This is a new party that's called Yes 21 and I'm going to give you a little translation here. This is their climate and environmental policy. The first one down the bottom is we invest and focus totally on climate adaptation. As I was saying, climate adaptation only and we forget about all that other stuff. We disconnect climate and energy from each other. Let energy do what's whatever the fossil fuel industry wants to do and climate, is that something else? We don't make that connection. And finally, do this in Dutch, you'll get it. Stoppen, net-vint, terbinus, or blunt and zays. Salivators and biomass. Just stop renewables. That's their position. Stop renewables. Sometimes I think that Yes 21 says out loud what some in the larger party, the FBVD, think. So that's a dirty secret, right? It's internal, maybe not so external. This is not what the Dutch are projecting when they go to Glasgow, believe me, or when they're at the World Exposition in Dubai right now where they in fact are celebrating Dutch sustainability. I don't see it, but all right. Okay, next, sea-level rise of obscenism. This is an interesting phenomenon. So the Dutch read, or many Dutch read, no, many Dutch, who reads IPCC reports? Some people read the IPCC reports. They hear about it at any rate. For the most part, there is a kind of culture of sea-level rise of optimism here. No way of putting it would be to say downplaying it. It's not gonna be so bad. 85 centimeters by the end of the century. No, so the best case scenario is what folks assume generally. And it's not just folks, but that actually translates up into government, into policy. And it's not just here in the Netherlands because when the Netherlands takes its policy and its technology to other places, it takes that sea-level rise of optimism with it. I'm not sure that that's always a good, no, I'm not sure it's not a good thing. It shouldn't do that. There are great Dutch climate scientists, oceanographers, et cetera. They work at Del Tires. They work at New Yorks. They work in Utrecht, in Waffeningen, at Del, et cetera, at IC. They know, and they are looking for all kinds of ways to let people know, let government know, to move government, to do what needs to be done. But so you've got folks who are scientists, who are saying we should be a little bit listening to what the IDC is saying. And other scientists are saying, in fact, we're writing for the, with the IPCC, many folks I know do write for the IPCC. And the government is thinking, okay, let's massage these numbers. Let's find a nice middle ground somewhere. We'll call it, you know, 1.0 or maybe 1.3. We'll give you 1.3, but we're not going a centimeter higher than that. Now this is the problem for the Netherlands because the Netherlands is very, very vulnerable. 60% of the Netherlands is not below sea level, but in total, 60% of the Netherlands is vulnerable to catastrophic flooding. And it could happen. If there are a perfect storm, it could happen much sooner than anything. It has to be a perfect storm, but climate change is of course increasing the likelihood of that, the odds that one in 10,000 year storm could happen in the next five years, right? That's the kind of thing we're facing. And the outlook for what lies ahead is different. It's very different. This is from the IPCC, oh goodness me, no it didn't, okay, I'm just gonna read. So according to the new assessment, global, I'm at the top there, global mean sea level rise above the likely range, two meters by 2100 and five meters by 2150 under a very high greenhouse gas emission scenario, so high as low confidence that it will happen. But this is the important thing, cannot be ruled out due to deep uncertainty in ice sheet processes. Antarctica is in the rear view mirror of the Netherlands. And lots of scientists in the Netherlands as well as elsewhere are watching Antarctica as closely as they can, trying to understand because Antarctica's behavior is scary. And that makes them, because of that uncertainty, that makes the Netherlands extremely vulnerable, but it's really, really difficult. Because the Dutch wants us, oh no, I'm not gonna say it right now, it'll come. Okay, okay, anyway, so that's sea level rise optimism. Water, friend or foe. The Dutch water story says, we have been waging war against water for centuries. How many of you have heard that line before? It's not too many. You haven't spoken to too many Dutch people yet. When you do, they'll tell you, we've been waging war against water for centuries. And that's why we are what we are. But for around 50 years, if not longer, a different attitude or approach towards thinking about water and our relationship to water has been around to regard water as a friend, to think that it's important to live with water, frankly, to return to a kind of local knowledge that is actually a Dutch local knowledge. You lived on mountains. You didn't live down below sea level. You didn't pump water out so the Netherlands subsided. You lived sensibly. The kind of thing that Ahmed was talking about. So that story is out there. This is, these are four scenarios for the Netherlands, for the future that come from Delta Tires. And I wanted to look at them with you briefly. They are protect, close, protect open, see words or advance, name of a difficult to translate in corresponds to accommodate, adapt, accommodate, accommodate water. And this is amazing that, because this was one of those things that came from Delta Tires to kind of shake up the government, shake up people and say, we've got to be thinking about this. We have some important decisions to make now that concern what the country is going to look like. Are we going to build a fortress and pump out the rivers, pump out the Rhine, pump out the mass, the more is it and so on? Are we going to do that? Are we going to pump out from the Isle of Mer from the Isle of Mer? Or are we going to leave the rivers open as we do now and just kind of continue to subside and subside and let the rivers rise and rise higher? And both of those pictures are like, that's nuts, right? That would be crazy to do that. The third one, same arcs, that's advance. This one is interesting because many, many Dutch people like this picture. It's like, yeah, that's like war against water, Star Wars edition. You know, this is like, wow, I'll show you some of the ideas. Neighborijgedo, that's the one where water is a friend. It's a friend that wants its debt back, wants its land back. And it requires retreat. And it requires all kinds of interesting adaptations involved floating, for instance, and other sorts of things. It's a challenge. It doesn't have to happen like this, but it could start to happen. You could start to think about the process. Okay, so advance. Here's one, that's the ideas out there. It's called the Haxen Venge. You build islands in front of the coast and you close the coast off. And so you would maintain an artificial water level. Basically what we have right now, which is NAP. You've probably heard of that, right? Which is a round sea level. We would maintain that. And the oceans would rise. And this would become fresh water, et cetera. That one's out there, ecological damage, of course. This is a huge, huge thing. How did that change? Okay, it's where I wanted to go anyway. This one is really crazy and it's really, really interesting. I don't know if you saw this one in the news or not. It's called the Northern European Enclosure Dam. And you can tell by the acronym that the guy who invented this is a joker. I was on a podcast with him yesterday. His name is Stuart Hustam. And it spells need, right? Many of you read the Lorax by Dr. Zeus. You know, everybody needs a need, right? And many Dutch might wind up thinking, everybody needs a need just like this. This would involve building a dam from the northwest corner of France to the southeast corner of England and from Scotland across the Shetland Islands all the way up to Norway. And letting the seas rise while maintaining that artificial level for all of Western Europe. Well, be very interested in what you all think about that. And talk about fortress thinking, right? It's amazing. Now, Schwartz does not want this to happen. What he was doing is something that I compared to Jonathan Swift's modest proposal. Jonathan Swift's modest proposal was, you know, we've got this food shortage and we've got this abundance of babies. And, you know, we could consider like eating babies. You know, it's like through its exaggeration, it calls attention to the problem. And Stuart was trying to do the same thing. He was saying, we, you know, we could mitigate, use the M word, or we could build need. It would be much better to mitigate than this. Unfortunately, in any judge case, this is a good idea, right? All right, this is plan B. So this is a designer's vision of what the Netherlands could look like. You could get into much more detail here. I'd encourage you to do so. You can go to his website. It was really, really interesting. It does involve retreat, moving, moving from the West to East. This is a big deal right now because the Dutch want to build a million new homes in 10 years. And most of them will be built below sea level or in vulnerable areas along the way. Because that's where people want to live. And how are you going to tell people, no, you can't do that. And how are you going to tell developers, no, you can't go there. Okay, next, savior complex. Now we're going to go abroad. The Dutch, many Dutch. No, this is actually, this is Dutch governmental policy. The Dutch government wants you to think you need them and that they can save you. This was at a Tour de Homes maybe five years ago or more six years ago, seven years ago. This was at the Eastern Schell Scrum Search Barrier. One leg of the Tour de Homes, I think it was a Tour de Homes, right, finished there. And this is what everybody saw. What are you thinking? That's supposed to be funny. What are you thinking? What are you thinking? Bring in the Dutch, right? And that kind of messaging, I have a feeling you probably have heard it. It's come across your, your radars, your screens, et cetera. That's there, right? We can save you. This, by the way, was a slide at a dissertation defense by Ellen Niekman, who wrote a really, really great dissertation about the Great Garuda, the Sea Wall, the NCICD in Jakarta about that project, which we'll talk about briefly in just a moment. Yeah, okay. So the inside version of this is what the Dutch call, the Dutch government calls the international water ambition. This is their policy. What does it entail? It shifts from rebuilding to preventing. I'm sure that you all can agree with that. That's really important, right? To prevent disaster rather than, and invest in prevention rather than invest in rebuilding in vulnerable areas. Improve water governance, increase the role of water diplomacy, improve the situation of vulnerable groups, also in developing countries. I like to think of those three middle categories as the kind of thing, not that the government does, but what IHE does, basically, right? I think the Dutch government has outsourced the three middle items of the international water ambition to IHE. That's what it seems like to me. And then that fifth one, increase the profitability of the Dutch water sector, right? The Dutch want to make a profit with their water technology and therefore convincing you that they can save you and your country, that helps them a lot with that. Okay, older humility. This is not a virtue of the Dutch, but I think that all of us have an opportunity to help Dutch people with whom we interact begin to learn polar humility. That's some examples here. Humility and humiliation are obviously not the same thing. Humiliation, though, is something that kind of occasionally happened. And these next two slides don't concern humility so much as humiliation. Humiliation is what happens when arrogance just persists. And then something happens that is humiliating. Humility avoids that. Yeah, I would say so. What was that? So this is the NCICB, the National Capital Investment Coastal Development for a great guru to see while project. It's not coming to be, certainly not in this form. It was a megalomaniac project. It was a Dutch project, working with the Indonesian government, with Jakarta as well. It's a very complicated story. I can't go into it right now, but it's an extremely Dutch solution. If you look at it, you might say, hey, doesn't that look like the hoax is needed? Right, same thing. Islands, this is supposed to protect Jakarta. 40% of Jakarta is essentially holders, just like in the Netherlands. It's below sea level, it's very similar. And this would create a freshwater basin to welcome huge freshwater basins and protect Jakarta from sea level rise and from storm surge and so on. Extremely controversial, lots of interesting things to read about it. I can't go into that right now, but take a look at this. This is the tulip. This is the tulip in front of the Dutch coast. Now you might think this is just a joke, right? We're itself. In 2008, the prime minister of the Netherlands, his name was Balken Ender. He thought it would be a great idea to protect the Dutch coast with a tulip island. And so he proposed this. And serious people at the Delta Commission, this is the time of the second Delta Commission, they had to work very, very hard behind the scenes to persuade the prime minister that this was not a good idea. This is a little bit humiliating too, I think. Humility is something else. And this is really where I believe we as non-Dutch have an opportunity to help those Dutch people we encounter who are plagued or afflicted with polar arrogance to learn a bit of polar humility. Polar arrogance stands in the way of two bilateral, multilateral cooperation. And it's so important. You heard Amit, he's so right. You bring so much to the table, not just what you know, but also your perspective on things, the kinds of questions that you ask. All those things are important. And if Dutch arrogance doesn't even let you get to say any of that, then where is that gonna go? Now, this is just one IHE example here. This is at the bottom there, that's Shanor Hassan who defended her dissertation I think about a year ago or so. She was a student of Margrave's and Ja in the Water Governance section. And she called it, as you can see, making ways to re-imagining policy transfer in the context of development cooperation. And it's a really brilliant dissertation. There are several articles that were published that you also can read. But she, I think, ideally represents that kind of critical but productive, constructive perspective that kind of feel, there was a lot of pushback. She really encountered pushback from the Dutch water sector when she presented and she talked to them, but she persisted. And I think people who have been coming around, she's been invited to be a guest, even with Hank O'Fink. So how many of you know who Hank O'Fink is? Like, just be an inquisitive. Whoa, that's not many. He is, that's right, five, six. Okay, so he is the Royal Dutch special envoy for international water affairs. He's Mr. Water. He's the water sherpa to the United Nations. He's a really, really great guy. He is not polar arrogant. He's in a difficult position because the position actually requires him to be polar arrogant, but he's not. But it's very interesting. I don't know how he does this, but it's very interesting. But in any rate, she knew her sat at a table. I think it was on TV. I'm not sure, it might be on the radio, but she sat at a table with Hank and there was a pretty interesting discussion that went on there. You will have those opportunities too. Want to say something about scale? I'm a professor of German. What am I doing up here, right? You have no idea what will happen once you start talking, once you tell people what you think, once you look around and see what leverage do I have? What can I change? Because it's, you do it and then suddenly you've got more leverage and more influence, you do that. And you have more and more. It's really crazy. It's a little bit, I don't know, it's sort of, I'm not a surfer, so I actually don't know. But it's something like that. It's like you are on water and it's the force, it's a force that's underneath you that you begin to ride. You can do that. It's really amazing. So I would encourage you. It'll seem like starting small, I certainly did. But if you do start, it will just begin to compound and you will become a person of influence. There's just no doubt in my mind that you will become a person of influence. If you do it and you do it for the right reasons and you do it out of a humility, not out of arrogance, but because you want something good and you want something good for others, that will happen. You'll make waves. All right, now we'll come to bullet guys. I have no idea what I'm doing on time, but at any rate, I want to show you one of my first gifts to the Netherlands. It's this animation. I created a persona whose name is Poltergeist. You might have heard of Poltergeist. I think there was like films with Poltergeist, a Poltergeist that's a German word and it's basically a ghostly troublemaker, right? A ghost is a troublemaker. And Poltergeist, my mind, is also a troublemaker, but he's the troublemaker of the Polters. And in another sense, it's like that part of Dutch culture that the Dutch don't want to confront, don't want to face, don't want to do it. They repress it. They, you know, it's down below, but that Poltergeist keeps coming up just like water and haunts them and so on. Anyway, I created this persona, Professor Poltergeist and Professor Poltergeist speaks to Dutch people and other people like you as well. And I'd like to share that with you. It's a five minute video that I created with three of my students. I think I should be able just to play this and, okay. Oh, I've got it going, so many times, man. Welcome to the project. Uh-oh. Can you just put these here to sign in? No. Okay, you'll have me ready. Poltergeist, an ongoing series of animated videos that plumb the complexities of life below sea level. I'm Poltergeist and I'll be your host as we'll appear beneath the surface in the Netherlands and other coastal regions. Because when it comes to water in the Dutch, there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. The Dutch are amazing. They have a powerful story about living with water and they're not afraid to let you come out. We've been waging war against water for centuries. We have water in our DNA. God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands. Their sponsor barriers are legendary. Each one of those arms is as big as the Eiffel Tower. While coastal cities like Miami and Jakarta worry about sea level rise, the Dutch say, relax. We've been living below sea level forever. We've got you covered and that's very reassuring. But how does it work? Parts of the Netherlands are like a big old empty swimming pool with a shallow end and a deep end. At the shallow end, water comes in from some major rivers. We're talking major. Ever hear of the running? But here's the thing. They don't fill the pool. Instead, the Dutch pull them through to the sea leaving the residents below. Along the coast, the deep end butts up against the North Sea. So there are dikes and dunes that keep the water out and those barriers on the rivers in case of storm surge. And there's rain from above, lambs of size and a water table that wants to rise from below and a population that wants to keep its feet dry. That's where the pumps come in. They lift the water that collects below up into those rivers above that then drain into the sea. It takes a lot of ingenuity and energy to keep that big old swimming pool drained. Okay, now we understand how it works. Which is how big is the Dutch swimming pool? I've often heard that 50% of the Netherlands is below sea level. That seems like a good number, half the country. But I wanted to be short, so I did a little research. The NAD Foundation says that half of the Netherlands consists of boulders that are below sea level. NAP is the name of that blue and white measuring rod that you see poking up out of canals and rivers all over the country. They don't know, right? But I started to run into numbers that were even higher. In the 2007 IDCC report, it says 55% of the Netherlands is below sea level. But it doesn't stop there. The console general of the Netherlands in Miami, one of those coastal cities that Dutch love save was interviewed on natural public radio and get this, she said 80% of the country is below sea level. But it's really almost our whole country. I couldn't believe my ears, 80%. No, wait, really almost the whole country. How is that even possible? Is the whole country like a drain swimming pool? Well, someone challenged the IDCC on their claim of 55% and the IDCC said, okay, we'll look into it. And they located their source. Guess what? It was the Dutch government, their own environmental assessment agency. Oops. So how big is the Dutch swimming pool really? It's 26% of the country. That's still a lot, but not half or three quarters or almost the whole country. So I have a question. How can a nation known for the precision of its water defense system come up with such crazy exaggerations? To find an answer, we're gonna have to peer beneath the surface. Let's invite the Netherlands to lie down on Dr. Holger as a couch here. Take a low dive. Now, in my opinion, these involuntary exaggerations of yours are symptoms. They're symptoms that emerge from the Dutch collective unconscious. What's the unconscious trying to tell us? I have two theories. Theory one, this is a display of bravado coupled with salesmanship. We're invincible. Why should we worry about sea level rise? The whole country's already bald sea level. And by the way, could we interest you in a sports and fair? We're going to anxiety here panic. Oh my God. The whole country's bald sea level and sea level rises accelerating. We're gonna drown out our own swimming pool. What are we gonna do? I think both theories are right at one at the same time. Two sides of the same gilder. Don't get me wrong. The Dutch really are amazing. And we're going to need their adaptive ingenuity more than ever. But that means being honest about the kind of urgency. After 2050, it may not be possible to keep this swimming pool drained. No matter how big it is. Accelerated sea level rise takes a whole new level of courage. Can the Dutch do what it takes? We will be watching. I'm publicized. You know where to find me. I'll be right here, hearing beneath the surface. Because when it comes to water in the Dutch, there's more going on that meets the eye. Thank you. Thank you very much. That's the first time I've done a public screening of this. I just wanted to show you this, though. The special thanks, Mark. Oh, two other things. I made sure there were Dutch subtitles. And my little niece did that, Josephine. And I also wanted to be sure there were Indonesian subtitles. And so a friend of mine from Stamada, she did the Indonesian subtitles. If any of you were to say, wow, I'd really love to have that with subtitles, let me know. We can arrange for that. Then I also want to show I needed credibility, right? Because it's like, who is this guy? He's a professor of German and I've been challenged that way. And I did. Because we consulted with all of these people. Matthijs Baal is an architect and designer. Lika Brackle is a philosopher. But she looks specifically at issues that come up around managed retreat. And my husband was the person who came up with those four gel tires scenarios. She works at gel tires. Margin and Klein-Hunst is an absolutely amazing river hydrologist at the University of Utah. Patrick Naderkaard is a comedian, but he and I work on projects relating to communicating issues with sea level rise to the Dutch. And Henk Niebuur is someone who works very much with building with nature. Eco-design is his company, but he's worked in many places around the world. That lends a little bit of credibility because all of them agreed to have their names appear here because they had talked to us about this and they said, yes, I can stand behind this. So that was my gesture, my first gesture to a gift to the Netherlands to help, you know, bring them out a little bit more colder humility. I hope that you will also, I'm sure you will also find ways to do that as well. Humor isn't the only way to do it. I think authenticity is also a really fabulous way to do it. Just be a person, be yourself, let people know what you think, how you feel and so on. That also matters. That's also effective. But humor is pretty good too. All right, thanks a lot. Thanks so much, Simon, for inspiring and entertaining later. And for the many ideas I am sure it brought to our students also about maybe what will you tackle in your first essay and assignments in your courses. You're pretty advanced in time but I want to give you the chance also to ask questions. Who wants to start? Hello. Hi, my question is with regards to the numbers you gave and how much of the Netherlands is New York City level. Yes. So at the end you said it's 26%. So I want to ask you how we would change that number. Okay, yeah. That number was the number that the Dutch government came up with, the Environmental Assessment Agency after they had been challenged by the IDCC. So that would have been sort of the best and safe measurement that was possible around 2010 or something like that. Probably the technology the use of satellites and so on to do that the calculations that are made they probably have improved in the meantime. And in the meantime of course too there has been some sea level rise along the Dutch coast for other reasons there has been not much noticeable sea level rise yet. I guess that's one part of the answer to that. The second part though is that the vulnerability is not just what's below sea level it's also should there be a storm surge should it breach the dykes of course a storm surge is above sea level there should be more above that. So that's one additional vulnerability and then another is the rivers themselves. So there are many areas along the rivers if I were to go back to that one map you would see that along the rivers where the rivers are above human habitation if those exceed their capacity if there isn't room for the river then flooding takes place. So I think technically there's an agreement that 60% of the Netherlands is currently vulnerable but I heard Peter Kloss who is the Delta Commissioner so he's the person who is at the highest level in charge of water security in the Netherlands he said after the flooding that took place in western Germany he said frankly 100% of the Netherlands is vulnerable. My question is as Netherlands continues to expand within the sea and not only in Europe and it's also in the south east Asia it will directly impact the rising of sea level in the first regions around the world so is there any restrictions on Netherlands and how much area they can expand and also about your retreat because some of the major cities lie in the swimming pool area as you said so what plans do they have for the cities if that's the case? No one's got a plan that's adequate for what's coming but I think you probably know this I have the pleasure and honor of being involved in something with Schurthustam who is an oceanographer and I frequently interact with Marjolein Hassnot and I know other climate scientists as well they live with a burden about what they know and even more despite the fact that some of them do their utmost to communicate it people are not listening they're not really listening so the scenarios the IPCC scenarios it comes across in numbers it will affect 200 million people it will affect 900 million people will be below sea level will be in danger of catastrophic flooding 900 million 1 billion people it's incalculable and solutions like seawalls it's not the solution it's not going to work it's not happening overnight it's definitely happening it's ridiculous these are processes that should happen over hundreds of thousands of millions of years and they're happening in lifetimes that's fast but it's not like it happens overnight and so it is important not just for the Netherlands obviously but for many countries coastal areas to be thinking about this now I want to bring in someone by the name of Salim Huk who is from Bangladesh I don't know if any of you follow him on twitter but he talks about he will be in Glasgow and he will talk and he talks all the time and very loudly and eloquently about loss and damage loss and damage loss and damage that has to do with the debt frankly that industrial western countries owe for their carbon to countries who have contributed very little carbon and who are extremely vulnerable they should pay a lot of money and damage loss of land loss of resources damage etc so that these countries can adapt find solutions and so on they are nobody is adequately equipped but as you can tell with COVID in the United States there are administrative booster shots now third shots in other places in the world 2% 10% are vaccinated and that does not bode well for how adaptation is going to happen how adaptation will be funded in the future I don't know if that's why I answered your question but that's how I would respond to that thank you we have time for my question my question has to do with when the presentation something I didn't grab actually is I don't know if it was highlighted is the debt at which the Netherlands is at the mostly level and the follow up question could be is the debt consistent in the entire of all at certain points I didn't say it explicitly and the video doesn't mention it but it shows it if you look at the swimming pool you'll see that the deep end is 6.76 meters and that is and this is also going to be not quite precise because there's always excitance going on that is the lowest point the lowest point of the Netherlands officially is 6.76 meters that's very deep isn't it think about that the swimming pool is a metaphor the empty swimming pool is a metaphor but it's a pretty good one has a shallow end and there's a deep end it isn't all focused in one area but there is a kind of focus there are parts of the Netherlands that are not below sea level they happen to be mostly in the east and in the south and so there are there's actually there's an app that you can get and then you enter your zip code and it will tell you exactly how far below sea level you are at that point I'm sure that Jennifer and Michelle can tell you what that app is I hope it's in English I think it probably also is in English too so that you can you can move around the country and you can take your measurements and see what's going on oh okay this is the director from Bangladesh I'd like to ask questions about the energy of the Netherlands and also the mitigation aspects of the emissions in the Netherlands what is the government's emissions in the Netherlands great great question so I have that on the slide somewhere but off the top of my head I can say so I can say sort of I did recently I did a talk so also it's on video where I compared Jakarta and the Netherlands and because you know because there's a feeling I think in the Netherlands certainly and I think it's widely shared at least in the Netherlands you know that you can't imagine two places that are more opposite than Jakarta and the Netherlands I disagree with that I think they're actually very very similar but they're also dissimilar ways and they're dissimilar important ways one is Indonesia is a huge country over 200 million people the Netherlands frankly the population of the Netherlands is still not equal to the population of the larger Jakarta area Java Republic that's around 30 million and the Netherlands is somewhere around 17 million so that's one difference but another one of course is GDP and another one is carbon per capita and I believe the Dutch carbon per capita is about five times what it is for Indonesia I think natural gas is what they rely on most for for energy certainly for electricity generation