 Okay, so it has been good morning to all of you. We apologize for too much time, but I believe that here now is the day to begin. So, rector by srector, Dr. Daisy Dutton talked to 30 of my new professors, professors, fellow PhD researchers, and all attendees, a special good morning to all of you, and I'm really welcome you to our PhD symposium. My name is Ube Best, my colleague, Alessandro Capitan. It is our privilege on behalf of the Graduate School and the organizing committee of the SIRS symposium to welcome you. We're delighted to have you here to participate and share in our annual PhD symposium. The PhD symposium serves not only to test and improve the communication and presentation skills of our presenters, but it also gives us a chance to discuss the novelties and limitations of their research, and it also allows you to be interested in what the PhDs are working on and are invested into, and more so, it allows the PhD researchers and staff to build their network for future research collaborations. And this year, we've integrated the PhD community a bit further by welcoming presentations from the Delft University of Technology and other Stets University. So to those presenters, we extend a very special welcome and we look forward to learning more about what you're working on. The theme this year for the World War II was Nature for Water. And this basically allowed the UN to create a platform for focusing on the importance of water. And it allowed for the discussion of nature-based solutions that can possibly allow us to manage the water challenges that we're currently facing in the 21st century, where we have damaged ecosystems affecting the quality and quantity of our water resources that are available. And we have situations such as in the American case where you have extreme climate change. Events such as the tsunamis and earthquakes and also subsidence that really causes an immense stress on our marine coastal areas. So, since we're IHU, which is the largest water education facility here, we're in an ideal place to discuss these challenges and come up with sustainable solutions. And this year, we're honored to have Dr. Fredia Van Besenbeek and Dr. David Zetlin, Dr. Van Besenbeek, I'm from the Greenhouse Marine, has been working in excess of seven years in nature-based climate defenses. And she basically focuses on the implementation of these structures and also the application of key knowledge jumps. And her most recent project has been the Waze versus Waze project, which has been quite, quite wonderful done so far. And Dr. David Zetlin is an associate professor at the Leiden University. And he is versed in the fields of economics, sustainability, and entrepreneurship. He's the author of several books and has given numerous songs. So we really look forward to what people will be sharing with us. And so, please prepare as we move forward to be challenged, to be excited and to be inspired by the presentations that will be shared over the next two days. And as I prepare to hand over to my colleague, Alessandro Capuzzi, who will introduce our vice director. Please, you remember that you can find the Wi-Fi codes along with the webpage for the symposium on the cover of your booklet. And once more, welcome and to enjoy our PhD studies. Thank you, Muba. It's my pleasure to introduce the first speaker, which is a professor of the faculty. Professor of the faculty has more than 20 years experience in water management for agriculture. And she started her career in the International of Management in the city, where she worked from 1960 to 2011. She was based in Sri Lanka, Ghana, Colombia. She worked on several projects, mostly relating to a watershed plan, Recultural Irrigation Management. She then was also involved in modeling, modeling in particular the Global Water Demand Supply, which brought to the development of this modeling and its application in several case sizes of the world. From 2012, she joined by H.E. as professor of the Land and Water for Food Security Group, and she is now vice-rector of the city. Professor Lagoon, please. Thank you, Joes. Thank you, Anthony. Thank you, everyone, for this welcome word. It's my pleasure to introduce, to open this seminar. Of course, a very warmly welcome to all the PhD fellows, all within IHE, but also from outside IHE. In particular, of course, our guest speakers of today and tomorrow. Those are, as already mentioned, Bernanke Brechtig van Weyzengrief, Dr. Zittendegend Zetland, Vincent Bui, and Peter Bundesdeum, so a very, very, very welcome to this event. I was talking through the program, and two things struck me in the program, which is actually quite exciting. It's a little different than last year's, more than one respect. But one is, for example, there's not just our PhD students in IT Delft, but it's really brought into a wider group of PhD students, which really is, I think, a very nice way to extend the research that we do here in IT, but also to produce research from outside IHE. The other thing that I really like, there's gonna be some workshops. And those workshops is a PhD in Engineering, which as everybody knows, not only IHE fellows or PhD fellows for that matter, but also staff. PhD in Engineering is a really powerful tool for learning while you're mentoring. You learn, but while you're mentoring, you also learn. So I think it's a very nice initiative. Another one, stress management, I think you can all use that, not only our PhD fellows, so I would say staff, please attend to that session, and data visualization, which is also, you see now that in many journals, they ask for a pictorial abstract, right? One picture that basically gives the abstract essence of your working people through research. I think it's of course a cliche, but indeed pictorial animation can say so much more than just a few words. So I think that's also a very nice workshop and a very nice initiative. So for just a reminder of the objectives of this PhD seminar, it's to test and improve communication that has a station skills, to debate the novelties, so I hope there's gonna be quite some discussion about this, but also the limitations of the studies. Of course, get inspired by your fellow PhDs and by PhDs from Team Delft and from the discussions among us, among ourselves. Build a network of IT staff and colleagues, and of course with the speakers and the outset speakers, many PhD fellows from Delft. Discuss future research collaborations between PhD fellows, for example, joint journal papers or scientific publications. And of course, strengthen the sense of community among PhD fellows at IT Delft and of course we also have ourselves there. Now about the topic. I really have to compliment the organizers for the topic. First I was, I would say, okay, nature for water, right? When I was working for IT, and I served for INU, for International Water Management Institute, we were talking about water for nature, right? We were, this was like some 20 years ago, we were talking about environmental flow requirements, keeping some water as a separate allocation for nature. That was basically the water for nature. There was water for domestic, water for industrial, a large part of the water for agriculture and then there was the water for nature. This was basically, well, still, let's say mainstream, when we are doing the comprehensive assessment, right, we go to water management, which was a study that was published in 1997, but it started a lot earlier, in 2007, sorry, but it started a lot earlier. Now, it may seem like semantic, right? And kind of a small wordplay. Nature for water, but in that just reversion of the words, I think there's a major, major mind shift. And I can maybe illustrate that a little bit with one example of the here in the Netherlands, the signature project that goes room for the river, right? It's really a big mind shift. First, and in the Netherlands, we wanted to get rid of the water as soon as possible, right? Pump it out, just, and if there's more water, build the lights, right? Hide the lights. So it's rather kind of a fight against the water and that's also what Dutch, well, quite often, you see people say, well, the Dutch have thousands of years of fighting water, keeping the water out. Now, this group of the river, it's actually a complete reversal, a 180 degree reversal of that, basically saying, okay, let's nature, let's have nature have a central part in our water management, rather than getting the water out as soon as possible, keep it and actually make nature help our water management. Retain the water and also create nature in our water management. So I think that's really a major reversal of the thinking. And you've seen that also in those recommendations, nature-based solutions, building with nature, working with nature and ecosystem services approach, et cetera, et cetera. The evening also in my own research field, irrigation. You see that it's not only water to produce food, irrigation to produce food and minimize the environmental effects. Oh, it goes one step further. That's actually the managed water such that not only produces food, but also benefits ecosystem services. So rather than having a separate adaptation for nature, water for nature, the reversal is to actually use nature for our water management. And I think I hope that we will have very good discussions about this. I would like to say to all the nurses again for all those three things, basically, except, well, a lot of things, of course, but the three things I mentioned is the workshops that I've been thinking is a very nice addition. Then the extension to a larger audience, not audience, but also presenters. Not only I teach the teaching, but also outside. And of course the topic that I think is really relevant. So with that, I would like to end over again to, then, well, thank you very much. And I hope we have some very, very good discussions. And in the end, also some stress really. Thank you. Thank you, guys. So as we proceed with the program, we will go into our first, and next lecture, Dr. Ferriette Neverson. She has an extensive experience in access to investment and ecological data analysis with focus on coastal and wetland ecosystems and chemical protection. She has an extensive study, guys, and a ministry of experience with nature-based defenses. And so giving a very long introduction, I just wanna welcome one of, I guess, key persons that I met in the initial stage of my research. And she has been quite instrumental in what she's been doing, and I look forward to her presentation. So please, you're welcome, Dr. Ferriette Neverson. Thank you very much for the kind words, although I caused you some stress this morning, I understand. By not sending my presentation, but I showed up here kind of early to test that. Can I do this one? This one. Maybe. This one. This one, because I don't like to just dance. Please, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So my work is focused a lot on floods. Actually, I was in Indonesia last week where I worked with the government on rivers. That was a bit of an excursion for me. I work on clouds mostly, but in rivers, of course, you cannot talk only about floods. You need to integrate with drugs. We do that, right? And what's kind of interesting, we see a lot of interest in the topic of nature-based because even in Indonesia, the ministry of infrastructure now wants to integrate because it's more in their guidelines. So I think that's a promising approach. So the topic indeed is even about the potential of floods. And there's another reason for that, of course, and that's because we find increasing risk, right? In Delta areas, we have some estimates like World Bank, but we see that exposure is rising because of people moving into more trouble, areas, we get bigger cities in that area. And it's exposure both to floods and direct disasters, but also consequence of these. So damages and estimates of damages are rising, they're doubling when we are looking at even to plantate and anthropogenic influences with its subsidence. Or this is just pure subsidence in Indonesia. And the World Bank makes estimates for yearly damages, focus on floods, because that is where we have data from. And if we look at damage, there's very little data actually from what damage is caused by erosion. But we actually, the expectation is that it's even more than by floods. And on the client, we change, increasing sea level rise, also erosion is gonna increase, or we think it will be, or not, it's not the evidence for that. Well, we have many people living close to both. So it's all kind of the question is, well, is it close to erosion, or is it people living in a dynamic coastal zone, right? I think those are questions you need to answer yourself on what you want to say. So, will green infrastructure offer us, or will gray infrastructure offer us a solution? That's a question I asked myself. And I, you know this around the world, is that implementation of gray infrastructure is actually pretty difficult. And many areas are not so suitable. So this is Indonesia, this is very many coasts of North Java. They implement seawall after seawall. But if you want to implement under these kind of soil conditions, actually implementation is a lot more costly. You need to do proper groundwork, right? But then the covenants that people have in gray engineering is enormous. So they keep investing in it while they see it was away every year almost. Of this seawall, it's hard to set foot for like two years. Same here, gray infrastructure is very much, so it's more island in the South Pacific. They see closer erosion, the direct response is implement a hard seawall. And you see here, I don't know who are of your engineers, but if I look at this, the turning is that I think, okay, what is behind this seawall? There's a road. There's, on this whole island, there's 2,000 people living. Why would you go to hard measures when you're exposure of people? You saw your exposure so little. I obviously didn't happen any because people say, well, we see erosion and then ministries or governments fly in and they start implementing what they know. The other thing what you see happening here, of course, is this is not really a seawall. To me, it's a fading design because it's very steep. We design a way to sleep and there's no spaces in the bed. Stood for a year, this wall. Not a cost. They dug out a lot of sediment in the forest where it's interesting to make this, right? Because those small islands have so many materials. So they have a design condition and they start digging the sediment and they have to see one. Design condition is not that important. Will really structure be the solution for all this? That's a question I ask myself always because we then just think it may be, but look at the big plane, man. Tsunami, maybe I should stop tsunamis. I think if we don't do this well, it can also be really dangerous. Because look, this is basically what they did after, I don't say the Asian tsunami, but there has been one or two times, but this is what they did, what was it, in 2004, a boxy. Boxy, that's right. The boxy, eh, you call that? That's right. In the 19th century. But this is what they did, actually. So that tsunami, it really was the way the whole coast was on the part here, right? The houses, people, the vegetation was completely devastated. But then this is what they did afterwards, they planted mangrove, but you see those tiny sticks and then how are they gonna protect you against tsunami. They recently, I use the end into the evaluation of these projects. Everything planted then, millions of dollars, the best of all gone now. So also not proper methods again. So this is another green infrastructure project in the Philippines. I was like this, and they did the same thing. Yeah, those are the mangroves for disaster issues. I'm like, where's the risk? There's a natural mangrove force in the back that they're not there out in the front, there's a reason, right? So I mean, green infrastructure is very dangerous, I mean. If you do not implement it well, it's gonna be a big failure, a big failure of rain. That's a nice positive start to start. So to me, the key is in proper implementation. And luckily we do not have to invent how to implement projects. Engineers have been doing that for really long. That is the post-engineer manual of the Army Corps. That is the flood-based management cycle. That is the integrated ocean zone management cycle. Now I've been using the integrated water resource management processes you have. There's nice a lot out there. There's a policy cycle, processes schemes. They basically all do the same, right? They give you a dedicated process and planning process for implementation of projects. So it says what you should do because that is where it often goes wrong. Because they see a problem and they just fly in with a solution because that is how we're programmed. We like to do things with things in the back. So I'm gonna look a little bit. We made this one. We made it together with 25 organizations as I said to people for implementing nature-based blood detection. Where you can actually use the brain and the brain as well for heart tractors. And to give a little bit of first guidance how you should do it and how you avoid the most common pitfalls. So what we did is we did this. We made, based on all these planning cycles, eight very basic process steps. And they do what all those processes have to see when the steps are made. But they're also like a sort of scan, you're enabling environment and conditions, right? Which helps you take into account what stakeholders like the stakeholder assessment. Here's financing strategy but sometimes you control it overboard if you're a government you already know how you're gonna find it. And then there's other steps in there. I'm not gonna go into this in detail because I wanted to spend more time on the other ones. We did this eight process steps which we also did five principles. To me the five principles are kind of interesting because we are now writing a paper together with eigen ecologists as you've already seen and I'm writing it together with many engineers about doing a bit of a paradigm shift in engineering. And we basically say that the paradigm between engineering should be based on three things. We should start looking at larger landscape units. So for example, if we are working in a river do not assess only an outer band that has been eroding, right? But you have to look at the whole river basin and then evaluate your options and look what are upstream downstream effects of solutions or implements. And the other, so we are advocating there in those in that paper three principles is larger large landscape skills of course also with climate change larger time skills and do scenario analysis for uncertain futures. But also to assess, to take into account co-benefits better. So not only look at the direct benefits of the solution but look at the co-benefits that nature may offer. The five principles that we've put in to improve interpretation of guidance are focused on this, the seasons feel perspective. So this actually is a clean up into the river and it goes into the zone. I use this picture a lot to illustrate why it's so important that also as coastal people coastal engineers, not the only coastal managers take into account the river because here what you see is basically you see a sandbar in front of the river and the sand probably that comes direct from that river. What we often see is that rivers transport a lot of shilty so small sediment particles and in a monsoon when the currents are stronger, right, the sand is moved up. And then the sand gets deposited off the coast. Also by the way, that throw it back onto the coast and get the formation of these bars and those bars are always very crucial in coastal stability. In Indonesia where we have the same kind of bars but then they're a bit lower, they're genuine life and they're actually the natural breakwater. So they function in breaking waves and you can see them offshore because you see this white surf in the foam area where all the waves break. And those bars, they keep stable whole mangrove flows. You have the formation of the Mississippi area that's a genuine plain coast originally, right, where it's filled out by the sandbar. Then you get marshlands and the wetlands to extend in the back and then other sandbar from in the front. So here, for example, this sandbar is probably keeping that wetland behind her stable and I've been actually on the ground here as well. So this wetland exists on a fairly short gradient. There's a little city there and this is a fairly short gradient moving from salt wetland to brackish to fresh wetland. So the foam is only salt. So the other thing that these bars do is they keep the fresh water in more. So as soon as that bar would disappear, the wetland would become more stable, the little people would penetrate bigger in it, right? And also you see these bars, they form here, it's broken but the interesting thing is sometimes they close up and then in a more soon, the water breaks through again. So as soon as you start cleaning things upstream in your river, you're gonna implement the bar dynamic circles. And right now what's happening inside of this thing, this is closer where Typhoon Gaian hits. It hit a pit, more further north because Typhoon Gaian is about 10 kilometers more north from the city. And right now the city is surrounded by gyps, Japanese and the present age. Even if it's big, then I'm done. But on the dam, they calculated for the dam to stop Typhoons, but they didn't calculate the yearly monsoon rain coming off that river. So right now that city already starts flooding because of the monsoon that cannot pass through the dam now. Also what happens in these areas, they take into account water pressures and then they forget the other one. They're by increasing risk by implementing solution, right? Instead of reducing it. So the other most important thing is why do a lot of these projects not end up very well because no risk assessment was done. Especially with nature-based solutions, you see it nowadays, people love it, right? It's like the Fenda for people, so they implemented especially NGOs and they don't have any experience with risk. They don't know what risk is of them and they say it's for coastal resilience or for risk reduction, but they've never done a risk assessment. So that's what happened. I think you guys may all know this, but risk was defined by the Sender framework as existing. There's many definitions of risk, but it's defined as hazards times, so your hazard exists of your probability of your hazard occurring any intensity of your hazard, times the exposure. So exposure is what is exposed to your hazard. So there should be people as right behind that are exposed to the risk. So often you see in the Philippine case usually people acting on hazard while there's no exposure, so there's no risk, because nobody here, I mean, a tree falls in the woods and carries around to do 2,000 hoops, right? If the tree falls in the house, yes. And then there's vulnerability that it takes into account. So vulnerability, you have to think about, are the exposed assets actually vulnerable and how vulnerable are they? And vulnerability can be lessened by, for example, if people are very well prepared, right? So that is about preparation, but also about response. So I can be prepared for the hazard, so there can be an early warning system. I can choose, well, there's a high exposure, there's hazard, high hazard intensity of vulnerability, but I implement an early warning system so I get everybody out of the region, so then they're not so vulnerable anymore. Or, for example, you have areas where people live on house roads, so then vulnerability is also small and actually reached this node. So it's a product of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. So you need to do those assessments to get an idea of if it's worth implementing something right. So this is another thing we strive for with Nature-based Solutions and the data that we standardize for performance and transition. And Uwe was already referring to those experiments we did last summer at Delta Alice. We made a willow forest in our Delta clue and that's actually because of this criteria. We had a lot of discussion about this one with 25 organizations and 90 people. I actually, I aggregate, we need to evaluate Nature-based Solutions in the same way we evaluate Engineering Solutions. So that's what I work for, right? I want to fit those Nature-based in a way that we test, that we design Engineering Solutions as well. And I think that will be very helpful because then we can do proper cost-benefit analysis for example, looking at is my gray solution more effective than my green one, for example, and how much effectiveness do I need in this area and what does it cost me to protect these people? And I can make a fair evaluation. And I think we are finding that that is possible. So what we are doing is, for example, is an example where if you look at a major forest and an electric combination that could reduce your hazard and flood risk, we can calculate, I think many of you guys are modellers, but we are able to calculate the weight reduction parts by the forest in front of the levy. And then based on that, make the dimension, make the right dimension for the levy, right? So we are finding, for example, that if we calculate the weight reduction by the main road, that the bright side of the levy can be lower, which means the base can be less white. So this is combinations of hard and soft structures, which I think are very, are more promising than we are looking to hit the design. So one of the things for standardized performance evaluation is one of the things we've been lacking are those measurements under extreme. So we do this big pledge about mangroves and tsunamis. They even make it up to the BBC, which is kind of reliable media, but these are the pieces we don't see often. Those were the mangroves, I think, after high young. That's what they really look like. So what we've been doing in the field as ecologists and physical geographers is testing these solutions, but never at extremes. So our models that we're using, like our weight reduction models, our weight attenuation models, are basically validated for the conditions where we have measurements, which is small scale blue, and field conditions where people have been out measuring, but nobody has been out measuring during high young or during a type room. So if you look at the measurements that we have for marshes and mangroves, I think they do not extend waves of about 20 centimeters. Tomorrow Vincent V is in keynote. I think he has one of the very rare cases where he measured waves up to a meter or maybe during some Christmas storm. But in general, we assess 80% reduction of a mangrove force or a marsh, but the conditions are not even a meter of water in the way that I'm saying. So that's a very other conditions that engineers designed for, right? We designed for one in 4,000 years storm or one in 10,000 year event. And if we use those models, what we now see in a model specifically, what we are now seeing, and that is why those experiments are so nice, we are seeing that the vegetation behavior may change. So we did this with marsh vegetation I think in 2014, that's already published, and we basically see regimes, right? So vegetation attenuate waves. When the waves get higher, that attenuation actually decreases, but at some point it flattens off. And that is when the vegetation that is flexible starts to bend 180 degrees. And this is typical, what's really hard to put in a numerical model because the bending is not really in, what's put in is a drag factor that is very often used as a calibration coefficient in a model. But, and then it sometimes goes all over the places, you will be here with the scientific paper which physically is not possible. So these are our experiments we did last summer, so when we did the marsh, we figured we also want to look at trees, which are a lot more rigid. So I've been working for two years, to get these happening because those experiments are actually expensive, I would say. We did this for half a million euros, still working on all the data analysis, and it has been really new also for us to do this in the Delta Room. So why do we do this in the Delta Room? It's because we want to test real scale because this type of vegetation, it scales badly to the small room because then the flexibility changes. We also want to look at breaking, is it breaking under those conditions? And we want to, well we want to have measurements under those extremes that we don't have from the field. And if we will not act or not, are not very likely to encounter one measurement because there are conditions that don't occur so often. That's why there is a method. Here we build a willow forest of 14 meters long. What you see are the top of the trees here. So there's a one and a half meters stem, and then the canopy is about five meters high on top of that. So you see the waves moving through the top. And you can see why I'm starting. You can see the gouges in your presentation. Never mind. I never do it, but. Yeah, it's gonna work. Really, it's gonna happen. There it goes. And look at the branches, what they do. They bend, they're gonna really go and move, there they come back. At least, they look really flexible now, but when you walk through the forest in the flume, they were like those branches are moving, branches like this. So they showed flexibility that I've never expected, and I would expect them to break, but they didn't. And the first results look good. Well, I wanna say you kind of promising you had a lot of issues with those wave gauges in the whole room, but they, you see attenuation by the forest. But it's only 40 meters. So what we see is when your wave length becomes a lot longer, and when that's always in the firmness, when your wave comes higher and your length longer, then when your length is longer than the forest you constructed, the effect is really hard to measure. That's why I wanna redo it with main growth and have a lot more products. So that's in the Iowa forest. Future, for the future. This is what we use it for. This is the model that was actually made for the north part, part of the group for the river program, where they implement in matters of willow-left incombination and based on that very simple swan model, swan vegetation, where you see the waves, they start at one meter with rain, I don't focus without vegetation, and the other lines are with vegetation. For example, interesting, you see the waves with incoming different wave heights get attenuated by a forest all to about 10 centimeters, right? So a wide range of waves height, but moved to a forest, you get like a single value out, which is for engineering science back interesting. Although, I think our experiments now, we still have to validate model and then scale up from our initial results. But this, I think in a model, we may be a bit overestimating the effect of vegetation. To take a closer look at this. Well, and basically what you want is finally to have these ventilated models to inform those areas of the design for the future. Um, four, very important for me. Also, in the five main goals, is integration and ecosystem conservation and restoration. Also important for you guys, when you work on these things, ecosystem restoration and conservation is a whole field that is out there. A whole field of research and science. There are like multiple books written about it. And it basically is not this, this is not ecosystem restoration. This is planting of mangroves in the wrong location because they planted them in a sea grass bed. I mean, sea grass and mangroves are bordering habitats. They're not overlapping. So by doing this, they actually do damaging effects to another very important habitat, but that is not the panda of coastal conservation because sea grasses are usually subtitled, below the water, people, I don't know, they don't like them as much as mangroves. They're not so easy to plant. They're more difficult to understand. I mean, mangroves are weeds, right? As soon as the conditions are right, they grow. So it's funny that we start planting them all over because they're the weed of coastal running egg persistence. So sea grass is not. Sea grass is sensitive to pollution, to nutrients, right? So they need to be nourished and closer to better. And what do we do? We start planting mangroves over there. Plus, I mean, so the ecological values it was many people in those countries, fish, shellfish, all come from sea grass. They're part of their life. Also from the mangrove, but those animals eat both. Then they plant one species, so monoculture, also not natural, no natural value in it. And it's a wrong species because if you would plant a species, start with a pioneer. Ecosystems follow a successional sequence, right? They start with a species that makes the environment ready for the next one. This is the next one, not the first. But everybody plants it because it's this, that you can just stick in a nut and then everything feels like you've done something, but you can't plant it. Still, so I will back. Ecosystems are raised in proper, ecosystem are raised, think about this. You make an assessment, you look what ecosystem used to be there, what is the reason that it's gone or created, right? Or not healthy. And then you try, and those reasons are often the apiotic conditions. They tend to be biotic, but then it's because of grazing, right? For competition or pressure or people have been catching one species of fish out of it. That's the main grazer of algae in the system, or that actually causes another species to become more abundant. But most of these are apiotic, so the conditions are not right for that ecosystem, either because of anthropogenic effects or just because it's changing. So with those erosion, it may come deeper, the waves should come higher, so it's not a good habitat for mangroves anymore. So here, these are, this is our project we do in Indonesia. What we construct there is permeable dams. It's permeable to minimize reflection, so waves get attenuated, but they're not reflecting. And those create still water conditions for sediment to precipitate, so that the right elevation is reached. And then the mangroves, and you can see that they come in naturally. That's the philosophy of that project. This is a Mississippi river where they made big diversions. I've already heard somebody mentioning reconnecting rivers with floodplains, for example, right? So in river management, we often actually cut off rivers from floodplains. And now we start experiencing the consequences of it, which is basically that we are getting the sediment also out of our coastal lands. So even with subsidence and sea level rise, those lands are not creating anymore. And here in the Mississippi, they're finding that they're losing so much wetland that they start to reconnect the river to the wetland system. So they are actually opening up the main channel in many areas and putting back the river in the wetland system where they want to have it, so not down in the Gulf of Mexico somewhere, but closer to the city of New Orleans, for example. And this is the consequence. So these are diversions and they actually build up new marshlands. Final principle, adaptive management, actually also important for gray engineering, but often what happens in the world, we implement a project that everybody runs away, right? Well, then the thing is, I think we shouldn't implement it if we run away because we don't burn either. And often then it starts failing, but there's nobody there to notice or learn them or very much. So it's always about learning, that start monitoring if you implement, evaluate what's happening, and if something is happening, there's nothing the right directive, right? And if you're not meeting your targets, then you adapt and start doing something different or implementing another action. So I think this is basically important for a lot of governments. You start realizing that as soon as you start managing the river before you coast, it's a never-ending process. And you need to have a certain, that is what you need to arrange an endless, at least you need to have a certain allocation of budget through this. So for the future, I think the challenges on MES is how to plan it well. I saw there's a live presentation in the next session on Dutch Delta Management, which is a lot about planning the Dutch Delta approach, but planning is really important and with your assessments probably before, well, how are you gonna do that, right? Design, construct, maintain, how do we do that? Because even if we can design a little bit with nature-based solutions, who's gonna maintain that member of forest? Who's responsible for it? Who's owning it? Will it be the mainstream subject work? So a lot of more governance questions, institutional questions will arise for MES. If we don't stop here, if we're talking about service commitments, and river and coastal. For me, it's really important how to scale up. Can we really scale up this solution? So if we see MES as doing planting, or if we see it as implementing a reef plow somewhere for reef restoration, right? This is never gonna be something that's guard-scaled, really gonna make a difference. So I think a lot of it is in proper conservation of the ecosystem that we still have, and in managing that they stay and remain healthy. Riding up, to me, the answers are in. Engineering at larger levels, it feels, actually basically working towards a stable managed management. That is what we should start doing, both upstream and downstream in coastal areas. And I think to find models for that with population pressure that is enormous and a lot of countries that's increasing, and then how to sustainably manage these areas and how to sustainably manage the rural and not to sort of, how do you say, push the consequences of urban to rural areas, what you see happening in some areas, right? We have the money to defend or to protect an urban area, but then the erosion is hitting the rural. How we will do that in the future. Learning by doing, so that's the punishment. And then trust isn't in their collaboration, which is challenging still in the Netherlands also. But if you wanna do NB as well, you cannot do it only as it's called this. We need to work together with all of these engineers and also managers, institutions, maybe the communities more there also management and for understanding of how we shouldn't just work and what they do, they're too great. So that was a quite, quite a new thing for the innovation to think that Dr. Fainas doesn't think. And if you would have noticed in this year we had included that theme session called in the 19th, Bridging Science of Being Innovation. And this session result was basically created so that we can have examples such as what she has presented that create a connection between the research projects that were all in-president and how we can actually implement them in the field and what are some of the common errors that happen. And so that's what we can take into consideration. So thank you for your presentation. And now we open up to a time of questions. So if you have any burning questions that you would like to spread here I'm sure she will be willing to answer them. And we have a throw box. So we're gonna have some fun to possibly wake up. So if you do have any questions just indicate and go through the box. I'm not gonna answer that. I'm not gonna answer that. I'm not gonna answer that. Thank you very much for your testimony. So you just want to find some nice pictures or try to not so well design of the approach that you're making. Do you see, especially in the nature of this one, that some improvement in its failure in time? And I think you really don't see a great failure I think it's a good question because it's interesting, I think each country goes through their own cycle. So what I noticed is that people are not blind, right? So I think we have in the Netherlands, it's a really successful project where we try to really integrate nature as a collaboration between these countries. I think those work well and I think other countries go through a cycle and I noticed what I didn't know because I wasn't even used to it. Because they really want to keep them in their diet and so they are managing them. They have to keep the resolution and are they ready for that? So I was only one in that test round. But they really are and they are off the record. They are not blind but they have their governance. Their governance is a big difference. There are so much people who have a high infrastructure amount in that now, right? So they build buildings and build a business with programs for building buildings. So their targets are building, building, building. But of what engineers do in the work that they see, that they coordinate with the same things. Hardly means keeping their attendance in the same order then with the labor each year. But then they say, so then they start thinking about themselves and they say, so easy, I can better re-educate that road completely somewhere else. But it's not allowed yet by their administration. And this is what, because the road is there, the one that is there, so they have to make a commitment to protect the road, follow the commitment, they have to protect the road and it's a lot more costly. So the cost benefits will not be positive, but they don't do their time decisions. But they start noticing and they want to change, but now it's going to be taking a lot of effort. So I think we both have the same time, but they are happy with it. And for me it's more like if the process for implementing rail infrastructure is not working well and they are saying, so you come and you tell us how to do soft, I cannot. I cannot suppose it's going to be right with rail and then you can say, for something, or you can do it, I'm trying to do it better than that. Thank you very much. Not to me. It's a very elegant solution that needs to be created by the world. But on the other hand, we are independent. We have to be in heritage of the nation as a solution. So are you fleeing from the real conversation of our community and the cost of the solution and the development of it? We also have to be in heritage. That's a culture that we have to be in. So for me really, I mean you can do this small scale for sure, let me comment, right? The big wins are in the different ways. First time, second year, second time. You have to also like to like to sponsor the large scale. I think the most important, is to do it right. where we still, because there's many, in many countries there's many, there's time, labor areas, people, for example, but they move in with the sets of measures that are very focused on straight delivery for, you know, labor vendors. And they don't do the assessment in the media. So for me, the first thing is, where we now, in the team, do it in a different way. And using prepossessions and have different mindsets in doing that, that's the first thing. And then I think for cities, it will be different because exposure is so high, there's high GDP. So you can always afford to do big, great schemes in protection measures for cities. So the problem playing out in those cities, yeah, there will be problems if the delivery is sustainable and longer, right? So, you know, I think of the stores, and in Jakarta, I mean, it's possible to protect, protect the season in Jakarta, but not if you, but if there's a lot of things inside. So, it's possible, but not for a longer piece. So, you know, there's problems to tackle first, right? I think we have to start with the... Thank you. What's up? What are you doing? What are you doing? Thank you. I'm curious about the chenerees and the sand banks, and I've seen plans for a project of strengthening those by nourishing them and so on. Has it actually been done anywhere to break the chance of success? So, to meet the... I'm trying to push you to Vietnam, but the second case of it will show me the examples. You also north of the chenerees. Really? Yeah, okay. Yeah, I don't know how well you understand their dynamics, if you're not, but I have to say, in this system, we don't understand the long-term dynamics of those chenerees, so they were gone, and also this area turns out to be more heavy to sign than we feared, because it's rural, so we fear to sign, we don't fear, but the fear inside of the aqua fear that is in Mahang is underneath the area. So, it's also subsiding, but it's just going slower in the sea all the time. And so, we fear those chenerees are subsiding also, so it depends on the heat of the sand whether they can heat up. And in the beginning, it looked like they weren't heating up, but last year, they were the storm, and it was like a massive amount of sand that was going down. So, we don't understand that at all. So, we saw the chenerees disappearing, and then suddenly, the mess broke, and some have extended like over a hundred people, one and two, so it's like two worlds together. So, and we see the same in our monetary research concerning the salt salmon by the lake, those get dumped on the coast during the monsoon. So, somewhere in the beginning of the monsoon, like a meter or less comes in, and then it gets taken out, and we end the monsoon again by the lake. But it also looks, so we're re-monitoring, and the idea of the dams was we tried that mess on the in, we stopped the problem, obviously, when you're taking it out. But then we see that in one year, a lot of mud comes in, and in the other, nothing. So, we search out in no growth in our free cells and erosion in the control flows. So, I still hear the monitoring of our resource are, yeah, the early dynamics that we are not fully understanding, yes, I would say the most important role, but the grid cells are working. So, that's it. But if you put a lot of change, you'll be helping the system for quite a while. Yes, I think it would work, and you could even do, I'm not saying the same ending, but I mean, we know how it's transported along the coast, right? And we can see from which grid are probably a sort of a reference. So, we can kind of do something with it, but we couldn't mobilize, but I would also like you to better understand, yeah, the process, which you're working on. Okay, so, it is my pleasure to welcome on stage the next speaker, which is Professor Devin Cipolli. He is a senior professor at Leiden University in the Hague. He has a PhD in the UC Davis in 2008 for a work on conflict and cooperation within public corporations. He studied for the municipal water district of South California. He then was post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley in 2008, 2010. And he is blogging, he has blogged economics. He's author of two books, Water and Economics. And we are eager to listen to this talk. Great, good morning, hello. Good morning, everybody. I'm going to speak kind of at a more philosophical level without actually being lost. So, I'm gonna speak a little bit about the bigger picture of some of the topics here and here, this symposium and also I'm coming to this as a political economist who spent about, actually my entire career from graduate school forward thinking and talking about communication. So, I'm very, very pleased to see the communication track here, but I'm also gonna make some comments based on my ongoing intensive discussions with people on all different dimensions of the water world because I think some of this feedback might, in some ways, help you with your own plans, your own ideas, your own work and make it more effective. My goal is to make it more effective. So, and thank you very much to the organizers for having me here. I'm very pleased always to be able to speak to people who are getting stuff done because I want to help them get that stuff put into place or get it implemented. Now, when it comes to, it's actually a stone, I'm sorry, a stone a year ago when they had a nature-based solutions conference and my first reaction was that we don't need nature-based solutions or solutions based on nature, but we need human solutions because humans, in fact, are the ones that are making all these decisions and as pretty much everybody here probably knows, replacing a natural ecosystem with a human built ecosystem is extremely ineffective and extremely costly and so in some ways, a lot of the work we've been doing as humans, our behavior or decisions has been to go against all these great systems and nature set up for us and now we're saying we should do something to be humble before nature and there are lots of interventions, including, you know, sand machines and so on, but the scale of which nature operates is at least a thousand times stores of magnitude, three orders of magnitude greater than we can accomplish right now even if we have nuclear power and everything, right? So, in fact, we've been missing this opportunity for centuries due to our hubris and now there's a little bit of a pullback and let's say we can use nature but I think as a political economist, I would say let's pull back some of those politicians and pull back some of those humans and then just in some ways, leave nature alone. That would be my advice. And as we know, climate change is, of course, what's now called, I think, appropriately climate disruption is not just coming in with a similar expected but a little bit bigger than expected and some of my worst fears, unfortunately, might be realized, which means where I live in Amsterdam might not be such a dry place in the near future. So I've been paying a lot of attention to this kind of topic. Another thing I wanna mention is that everybody in this room, of course, is what we call converted to the cause, right? You're actually in the room and the small minority people here who actually understand the need for interdiscipline communication, they understand the need to talk to policy makers, they understand the need to have realistic solutions. That's great, but the other 99% of the population that's not in this room doesn't necessarily understand that and that actually creates a real problem because we need their agreement, we need the money, we need their votes, et cetera, et cetera to move forward and that is a real challenge, especially when we have some organizations, the Corps of Engineers, the US Army Corps of Engineers, my favorite, some organizations that are totally incompetent that actually deal with changes in this world and because they're self-secluded, they don't, and also, of course, subject to political direction, they're not necessarily up a program of changing what they've been doing for several hundred years. So, and the other part, the last thing I'm gonna emphasize, and I was writing notes because I was hearing all these things when I updated my presentation, don't get so excited, don't worry, is that communication is then mentioned here a couple of times and communication is absolutely the most important thing you can think of and I'll come up with this more as I go through, when you publish a paper that is not the end of your work, that is the start of your work and you need to go talk to other colleagues who have a regular paper, who have a regular paper, you need to make the digestible, you need to talk to news reporters and all of that is not natural for academics we're used to sitting in our room being left alone with our models and with our math but we really do need to be out there and talking to people because otherwise, quite honestly, your work will be wasted. I just gave a talk on the weekend on Saturday with our alumni talking about a paper I wrote with another student, it took us about two years to write it, it's called History of the Street and Water Sector so if you're interested in that, look it up, it's a fantastic paper and it has a grand total of 6,000 notes since it was published about three months ago. Now, as you hide the paywall and I've made it easy for hires to find it and so on but what we're talking about here is two years of work with let's say 6,000 notes and that is, I think, a little bit normal, right? The modal citation for a PhD dissertation is zero so that means that if people even read your dissertation which is unusual, then it's unlikely they'll ever use it and if you're thinking about the importance of your work then I think you should give yourself the benefit of trying to get it in front of people so that's what I'm going to emphasize a little bit through this talk, there we go. Okay, so we've heard about me. My blog has changed from auto-anomism to one of the economists who are huge back of that but I still do talk about terrible failures of political politics but I've been working a lot on collective goods which is going to come through on this talk. So today we're talking about this prompt and as I mentioned, your solutions, if they're too academic they're not going to get out there so your solutions, your work, your analysis that needs to be accessible, understandable, feasible, actionable and acceptable and don't worry, I do actually find and need some next slide if they're going to replace existing failing policies so by accessible I mean that can have non-academics even get to your papers, right? They're buried behind paywalls or some of this to your place if you can't find these things quickly then that means no one else can because people don't even know they're looking for your work so making it available is actually really important. Is it understandable? Are your assumptions just totally not going to work? I usually, I'm an economist the vast majority of dichotomous papers are not worth the first paragraph. We build them all, okay done, I'm done. So avoid jargon, right? There's too much jargon in a paper and a late person can't pick it up. It's no sin to write a paper that a normal person can understand. Please, please just use normal language you can use jargon occasionally but normal people will then be able to use your work. It has to be feasible. Many solutions, first there's all these jokes two economists are stuck in a boat in the middle of the ocean they're all of their food and water and cans the economy says first, assume a cantilever. You can't assume things that just aren't there, right? So keep these things realistic. And when you're talking about solutions and that was coming up in your talk this morning these solutions that are not actually working for the whole situation, well, what am I talking about? And they have to be, they can fit into local or existing institutions, you just can't show up and say I have got the solution for you. Back in the 1960s the very smart agronomists went to Bali they decided they said we have a solution for increasing your rice crop you're gonna have lots of food, you're gonna use less water et cetera, et cetera. They said stop using a traditional way of allocating water and planting rice if you don't know about the story it's a book about it called Precinct Programmers it's a great book. And basically these agronomists came in and they had all these great solutions which did double the rice crop in the first year and then they failed in the next year because it turned out the old traditional magical ways of growing rice had a lot to do with keeping pests at bay, right? And so the pests rose up and ate all the rice and they lost their whole crop. So the superstitious religious ceremonies they've been using for a thousand years were actually well-conceived institutions that respond to local conditions and the engineers who showed up and the aid consultants who showed up hadn't been there for 15 minutes before they came up with the great new idea which in fact was a terrible idea. So it has to fit within local institutions and those are something I work on all the time so it's just the rules and the norms that are in place in a rural situation. And of course they have to be acceptable. Now this is the worst one at all because the powerful in many cases do not like change and the powerful will often stop good ideas because either that will cost them money or it will make them work harder or they have to learn a whole new, whatever, anything paradigm of thinking. Like I said, the core of the genius is in this category and so in that sense, your ideas will be stopped for no good reason except that change is uncomfortable for those who are benefitted from the current state as well. And climate change on disruption is going to put a lot of weight on this because the holdouts in the Bayland policies are going to hold out, hold out, hold out but then it's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And I just heard the other day about building a brand new train track between Miami and I think it was Palm Beach, Florida. Now if anybody's been paying attention, Miami is on the list of cities most likely in the underwater the next 20 or 30 years. And building hard infrastructure in the middle of that area is quite amazing but those people where they put more money on the ground, oh this is where the core of the genius is, this strategy, when you put more money on the ground there's more to lose and therefore more to defend. And so the cost-benefit analysis that they use is that the dumber of the idea of building your palace and the flood plain, the more likely it is that core of engineers are coming back and supporting your palace and the flood plain as opposed to don't build a palace and the flood plain. So it's kind of funny but that's what they do. Okay, so what I'm saying is nothing new, right? You need to work harder than you want to, right? You need to have extramural partnerships. You have to have partnerships with non-academics, you have to have partners with people on the other floor and the partners with people with different disciplinary backgrounds. If you're going to get your ideas into real change and that means the people skills that means coffee to each other, that's why coffee brings to the most important part of the conference. And so here's some of my brief comments on these various four sections for today. The challenge, okay, so water is a wicked problem, difficult, so it's a laser in your summer. Anyway, there's a quick note. So it's a wicked problem and there, because there's lots of things going on at once, kind of life is like that. But what we have, I identify three things which are the biggest problem. One is that there's not as much water as we were used to, abundance. So it's abundance of fresh water, it's abundance of clean water, it's abundance of water cleaning services if you want, it's abundance of land to live on. We had abundance and now we don't because there's a lot of people on the planet, seven and a half billion, going to 10 billion and all of those people, much more importantly, are consuming at a far higher rate than we were consuming before. So a lot of resources and environmental services which are for granted are stressed, taxed and under the trouble because of that abundance. We have those, we just go for granted. Even in the ocean, we used to say, as limitless as the ocean, we used to say, as limitless as sand on the beach. And now literally sand is in shortage in many parts of the world, Singapore being the number one place with the sand mafia. So we also don't know where we are, we have missing data, right? In the majority, if anybody works on groundwater, we know we have almost no idea how much groundwater is out there. We all do know the rate of which groundwater is being taken away. We don't know what's going to happen with the planet systems based on loss and non-stop stationarity. We don't know what quality and most tax and most cities on the world because it's usually not tested at the top, it's tested at the pre-water plant. The data is missing on all kinds of different corrections and yes, that's a good idea to get more data but it's also, I think first, a reason why we should be humble about what we know because usually we don't know. And then third, the area that I work on and I'll say a little bit more about this because this is my contribution to your knowledge, you'll see it on the next slide, is that there's overlapping consumption on the private side which creates benefits and then creates a cost on the public side or the common side. The most common example of this is burning fossil fuels. Everybody's happy to fly on an airplane and get on an airplane to go somewhere. Everyone's happy to get on their car and try somewhere. That private consumption of those fossil fuels results in energy and energy emissions that affect the commons of our global atmosphere and can literally put a country under water. A country that had no idea what climate change was that it may not be driving cars or flying planes that country is now gone because of that overlap between the private and the commons. And it's in the water sector that is an ongoing situation that is getting dramatically more relevant and dramatically more complicated because water is the vector on which climate change is driving, right? So let's talk about the commons for a second. This is me being the professor, so take your notebooks out. We're gonna make a box, okay? Now in our box you've got a two by two and we have two columns and the question is, is this good excludable or is this good non-excludable, right? Excludable means I'm holding this, you cannot hold it if I'm holding it. Non-excludable is I'm talking you can all hear it, right? So is excludable or not? Now another question we have is is it rival or subtractable or non-rival? As in if I drink the water, it's gone. You can't use it. Or if I say something then if you hear it it doesn't mean that someone else can't hear it also. So is it rival or non-rival? Now from these two different characteristics we can do the entire universe of political economy and that is that we'll talk about private goods, talk about public goods which is not so confused with public schools or public education or public housing or public any of those things. This is economic jargon talk here. So what we have is private good which is what you're used to it's the phone that you're holding in your hand. It's a public good which is the non-rival with non-excludable my talk right now it's public good, you're welcome. But then we have things like these two more interesting things, old club goods, the door is shut, you're in the club, you're excluded, if you're not in the club, the door is being pulled out. And then we have the common pool good which is where all the action is. That's where all the fun stuff is. And because it's non-excludable everybody can get to it but it's rival in the sense that if someone uses it then you can't have it. We know this is true with groundwater obviously. We know this is true with budgets. The Dutch just have to do stuff, right? Everybody's fighting over that pot of money. Who's gonna get some more money for that for their priorities? Who's gonna get less money? So that's the commons. And commons is where most of human success and failure shows up by the way. So the reason this is important is because economists often talk about that excludable column. They talk about where markets work, right? Because we know that markets are very good at allocating with prices and property rights, whether it's a farm, whether it's a house, whether it's a parking place. We know that markets are very good at that but there's a whole other part of the world which is the non-market side, the non-coms, doors open, you can come in and stuff it. So we have the non-excludable side of the world which is where you have political management necessary or if you're the fan of Eleanor Ostrom and that entire school of thinking which is what I spend most of my time, you're interested in how the community will manage history, so just the community will manage these goods. And what this means is that you have to take both politics and economics into account. I do this, now you may not be thinking this because you're a technical person or a scientist but this is going to affect your work and if you're working in the commons and you're not thinking about the market or you're thinking you're working in the market or actually working in the commons then you might have a lot of misinterpretations of the governance questions that are facing you. So this is the framework that I teach all the time. This is the framework that I'm going to use a little bit to talk about these major water topics and then maybe you can use it if you're your own work and if you have any questions obviously please contact me, I'm easy to find. So and in general please contact me if you find it. Love communication. Okay, so now let's talk about water, food and energy security. So the first thing is, is everybody said talk about the nexus, I hate that word, super word. It's not a strategy. And especially since if you manage the nexus then you're leaving out all the other 72 words that you can hyphenate after water, climate change, community, childhood development, everything can be hyphenated after the nexus. So, but we know is that energy is by far the most important word in this sector and it's triumvirate because there's a lot of money involved. And that is one reason why climate disruption is not slowing down, it's getting worse because the people that like using energy are agree with people that like selling energy and fossil energy, but it's a good idea to use as much fossil energy as possible. And all of our good intentions and the parrots are core of notwithstanding we're not doing pretty much anything to lower the consumption of fossil energy. What that means is that all of the worst case scenarios of climate change might be a meeting case scenario of climate change. I'm a big fan, unfortunately, of the not one meter by 2,100 but more like nine meters of sea level rise by 2,100. I won't be around to see I'm sure the Netherlands go underwater, but that kind of possibility is something that I think is not taking seriously enough. Second, or third, water is the vector on which this disruption will rock, right? We know we're going to be getting bigger storms, we're going to get longer droughts. All the same thing to think of as water related is going to get worse with climate disruption. And third, food, of course, uses both water and energy. Water will end up being, I believe, a constraining resource. The most relevant example I can think of right now is the one I just saw about the other day. The rate at which we are mining groundwater from aquifers that we use for food production is unprecedented. And by definition, mining groundwater, unsustainable use of groundwater, means that water will not be there. Right now, we have 7.5 billion people in the planet who are consuming a, statistically speaking, mostly vegetarian-based diet. As they switch over to a wheat-based diet, tastes better, and all kinds of other superstitions, then the water consumption per capita is going to rise, we're also going to 10 billion people, and that water is not coming back. It will be in the ocean, which is handy unless you want to grow something. And so, in that sense, we might actually see more famines where, and food shortages, and depending on the politics, so famines, because the politics is going to determine that, based on the rain fails, the monsoon fails, and the groundwater isn't there anymore. And therefore, you can't go to your insurance policy to grow the crop. And so, those kinds of crop failures are going to become much more frequent because the water just isn't there. And this is something that is, I think, only getting worse. And so, I'm going to say a little bit of a policy that's failing, and I'm going to try and pull it up, a policy that is succeeding in each of these sectors. So, the failures we're having are countries that are mining that groundwater for so-called food security. Saudi Arabia is a world champion at this, who say, when they should be leaving that groundwater, is when they need it, and they should be training for food as a way of keeping food security. We have government policies. The common agricultural policy, the United States agriculture policy, of both disasters, by telling farmers, grow this one crop will pay you a lot of money. Guess what, all the farmers grow up that one crop. They get a modern culture. The market is totally disrupted. There is almost no hedging against risk. The government itself is coordinating farmers to fail as a group. So, these kinds of policies are longstanding. They're rich countries, and they're ongoing failures, because there are members of the, there are all political and economic actors who prefer it that way, usually because they get access to very cheap inputs, right? The big trade and cultural trading corporations, for example. The farmers themselves, they barely run through the cost of failures. Success, I'm a little bit radical here in terms of saying anything decentralized, but compared to what we are seeing with centralization of energy management and centralization of water, I think decentralized types of solutions where the benefits and the cost, they show up in one location, so the people that at that location can manage and balance benefits and costs are much better than when it's centralized and one group is screwed, sorry, one group is treated unfairly, compared to the other group which is benefiting usually through some kind of political maneuver. I wrote two papers on desalination, by the way, which is where these kinds of things come up. Desalination usually benefits a small population at a cost to the majority. Water sanitation and ecosystems. So the solution to pollution used to be dilution, but now there's not enough dilution around, right? So even the Pacific, the oceans are full of plastic, there's not enough dilution, how are the plastic? Ecosystems are dying from almost every direction. We have thermal pollution, chemical pollution, biological pollution. As I mentioned at the top, replacing ecosystem services is extremely expensive. We're talking at least 101, and it's almost like an infinity because of course we were given these endowments of ecosystems and totally had no clue about how valuable they were until we started trying to replace them and then we figured out how expensive that was. My favorite point here, you might have seen it already, is that men, sperm counts are down by 50%, so men like to have lots of vigor in children and unfortunately there's so many chemicals in our water supply based on endocrine disruptors that men are going to be very not so vigorous and it's not going to get a lot of attention and tell them very powerful politicians can't have babies with their young wives and then they'll say maybe we should do something about this finally. So I hate to say it, but going directly for the most important aspect of a male identity might be the way to get policy change. I would have any results on this, but I want to magnify it because we need these results as soon as possible because a lot of men are not paying attention. So failures, failure to pay for pollute, right? That's one of the key aspects of the water framework directive is if a polluter should pay, that's clearly not happening in many circumstances, even though it is absolutely affordable, right? This is the saddest thing, it is not that expensive to clean waste water, it is not that expensive for farmers to change their behavior, a paper that I love was written by, I don't know exactly, but it was a conference I heard about at the Conanian and it was a paper that said the cost of pig farmers in the United States complying with the clean water acts for which they are exempted. The clean water act was in place since the early 1970s and immediately farmers were exempt from all of these conditions because farmers would go to the G Corps, they'd grow food, they'd feed people, et cetera, so all kinds of political lobbying. The cost of those farmers complying with the clean water act, which is to remove one of the largest sources of pollution in the United States, around water pollution, surface water pollution, is five cents per kilo of pig. Now, I don't care if we eat pig, the five cents per kilo is not very much and the farmers are saying, oh, we have to make it cheaper, but I don't think the consumers actually care and the regulators are asleep because the cost of saving those ecosystems from this particular kind of pollution is actually quite low. So in that sense, that's why I'm saying this, there's a lot of lost opportunity, people just not even looking into the numbers. The cost, for example, of carbon tax, by the way, is roughly, I think it's less than 10 cents a liter for gasoline and that's more than zero, but it's not very high, it doesn't make the world collapse and you can look at gasoline prices from one country to the next and see much later changes of price in 10 cents a liter, but we, for example, have decided not to save the planet because it's not worth paying 10 cents a liter more for gasoline. That's, I think, going to turn into a real tragedy of, oh, I wish we had done that. Ecosystems are fairly monitored, like we'll manage the NASA data problems I mentioned and they're dying rapidly. When the coral systems go out, then we lose, of course, a huge part of our biodiversity. We also lose a good chunk of the source of food for hundreds of millions of people to be conservative as well as those nice things we like to swim around. So, this stuff is happening very, very fast. Successes in water sanitation and ecosystems is closing the loop. Singapore tends to manage its water from the rain all the way to very little discharge or anything they have is managed. Singapore is unique in some ways, but not unique in other ways. Of course, they're small and rich, but they also focus their attention on water because they see water as an issue of national security. Israel, you can say similar things, but Israel has some very big problems with its neighbors. So, I'm not going to cite them as a good source. And then, Head Diffen, how do you say it? Is that a nice thing to call them? Head Diffen, yeah. So, this is the folder on the Dutch Belgian border, London border, and it was a folder in 1907. And as you know, the Dutch are very proud of making land and not giving it back. And this was a massive success in terms of allowing this folder to be flooded. It was part of a complicated deal to restore shipping to Antwerp, which may be not a great idea, but it doesn't matter. The point is that you need to sometimes say, we're going to lose some productive agricultural land in order to restore some of those ecosystem services, which are, by the way, quite useful. So, there are successes out there also. Weather streams and hazards, as I mentioned, these are only going to get worse, that's what I've said. So, now, what's interesting, of course, is that our ancestors, a hundred gatherers, when there was a tsunami or when there was a flood or when there was whatever, they would just move away. They were walking all the way. They weren't necessarily living in condominiums on the oceanfront, or they weren't worried about their cars, those cars right in front of their house. And so, we have, I think, to confront a fact right now, which is that some of our infrastructure and some of our major cities are going to have to be abandoned because either the temperatures just get too high in the daytime, this is made in case for central India, of course, the Middle East, or we might have to abandon them for rising floodwaters, like I mentioned, Miami's on the list, Chicago's way ahead of Miami on that list, and go somewhere else. If you, as an individual, were deciding where to live or why to buy property, I would ask yourself, is this place going to be here in 50 years? Of course, what I mentioned is the rich, who have most of their wealth tied up in land, in real estate, don't like this, so the rich tell the politicians they have to defend my land, the politicians say they have to defend our community, notice that the land is not the same as the community, because the community can leap, right? But the politicians want to defend the land, which belongs to the rich people, who are funding the politicians, and that is how you get a lot of really dumb ideas, like building z-walls or building back stronger, all this stuff that the Americans talked about, here we go, and Jakarta's a z-wall, I think the water right now is about this far below the z-wall, and they're going to defend that, I think, what, this is just right off old Jakarta fatality of the world, parasite is now under water, it's an underwater park, and that means facing reality, and there's some dictators that have moved their cities to the middle of nowhere kind of stuff, and I'll talk about that, that's just like so a dictatorship, I'm talking about actually going somewhere that is viable place to live, not just based on someone's whim. Early morning systems, of course, are increasingly more useful and increasingly more helpful, there's lots of examples of these systems giving people more time to respond, even to earthquakes, which are not climate related, but and tsunamis and so on, those systems are getting better, and this is again a data situation. We have to spend a lot more time on training and relocation, there is almost no effort put into training because everybody hopes it doesn't happen. In Houston, I think they mentioned, I think the statistic was, Houston was having a 1 in 500 year storm hurricane, most recent hurricane, except it's a third 1 in 500 year hurricane that's held in three years, so I think that their baseline, I remember it was a little bit wrong, and their ideas of how to assume a draw were not tested and so there was much more chaos. Katrina, the 2004 hurricane in New Orleans, of course, showed a lot of Americans that they had no clue what they were doing, and that did result in a lot more training, but everywhere in the world they needed to be doing this. In New Jersey, after Superstorm Sandy, super, never seen before, bigger than ever, we're going to run out of words, right? We're going to get super, super, super, coming down a bit. The longest-run hostile storm, just to show up in the near future, and say, well, we've never seen this before, and in New Jersey, right next to New York, and Superstorm Sandy hit both of them very hard, and they are now, after years of work, succeeding in getting people to sell their houses and return those houses into wetlands, and that is a very interesting, complicated problem, wicked problem indeed, but there are actually people on the ground that are getting stuff done, so these are just news stories, of course, but everybody might have their own versions of success, and as I said, tell me about them, because I'd like to advertise this stuff on my blog. Now, bridging from signs of implementation is, I think, the most important topic here, according to me, because this is where I work, and it's, like I said, if your work is done, but it doesn't get out there, then it's going to be a loss of your actual art effort, so academic publication is not the same as communication, as I just mentioned, academics for sure can shoot it, and will learn from talking to practitioners, and vice versa, this means it's just an ongoing dialogue, you'll learn from each other. I've talked over these years to my blog with thousands of people, and they taught me more than I would ever learn through class, and practitioners, they lack strategy often, often what they do is they just, what they were doing before, it's a little bit better, or a little bit bigger, a little bit more left, a little bit more right, a little bit more red, whatever that is, they're incrementalists, and so in some ways, if you have a strategy for them that might say, what you're doing is a bad idea, you should be very polite about this, but maybe you should try a pilot, or you should try, as someone said, where someone else tried something different, and that might work for you, those kinds of suggestions can be helpful, but that's only the start, number one, they have to listen to you, number one, they have to remove them, number two, they have to listen to you, number three, they have to have the ability to actually do something, and number four, then they have to come back to other people to do something, so it takes a lot of work to get changed within any kind of practical organization, it's doing any version of work or management, and so they usually get business as usual, but I honestly think that the more time you put it at that, the more likely it is you're actually going to have a positive impact with your work. Most economists have failed on this one, they don't understand the difference between risk and the certainty, there's a very fine paper out there called Fat Sales Risks by Marty Weissman, who basically says that economists and their cost-benefit analysis of climate change have so monumentally screwed up the numbers that pretty much every economic study about the benefits of acting on climate change is wrong by several words and magnitude, which means almost all policy advice are constantly giving governments the wrongs well, that's a little bit tragic because that might mean the difference between the end human civilization and the good life, but that is a fact. IPCC has been too conservative, as you know they go for the lowest, the consensus opinion on any given scientific question, I know there are more radical opinions out there, but the consensus opinion in some cases becomes the most aggressive scenario on some people's minds, and as I mentioned earlier, I don't think that the IPCC discusses the most radical scenario nearly as much as they should because it turns out that those radical scenarios are turning down to be the average scenarios, and a lot of people are not planning for that and they're going to get very upset. Army Corps of Engineers for good. So, Deltares, when they are working, and I'm not gonna bless Deltares across the board, but it is an organization which has the benefit of constantly trying to work with clients and bridge from theory into practice, that is a blueprint I'll get behind, and they need to be working on actual risks with clients that are actually open to new ways of doing things with, and of course, field testing at work, I think that's pretty much, would you agree with that roughly? Roughly. Okay, because I'm putting a lot of caveats in there, because the example of New Orleans was that when Deltares and all the other Dutch consultees showed up and the Americans said, you wanna build it back stronger, they're like, okay, it's your money, and then they didn't evacuate the Lower Ninth District, they didn't evacuate those normal areas of New Orleans because of local politics, and so, yes, they took all the money, they put all the studies together, they're enrolling studies of the next failure is to have in New Orleans. So, in that sense, you have to have good clients. So, here's my bottom line. Water-related topics are all getting worse simultaneously. No matter where you work, your work is needed. We have problems with outdated institutions, mismatched costs and benefits, some people get the benefits and others who are gonna bear all those costs, usually poor people, right? And an ongoing failure to prioritize long-range planning over short-term consumption, that's like the human race. And this is me feeling as optimistic as possible. We're gonna have very difficult lives if we're still alive, but our communities are actually gonna be the foundation of our future. Our communities have organized well that manage their local water resources, whether it's groundwater or against floods, they're going to do better than communities that are worse off. But the ones that are not doing well are actually going to invade, attack, or need bailouts and help from people that are still around. We're gonna, in my opinion, our lives as the human race is our, the average quality of life is peaking right now. It's going to go down because we're gonna have to spend so much of our resources defending ourselves against climate change, that we will have not as many resources for new iPhones or faster cars or bigger houses. We're just gonna have to have smaller houses with higher foundations. We're gonna have to have phones that are water-proof and tsunami-proof, et cetera. We're gonna have to spend so much money on defending ourselves that we won't have as much of an assumption that we've grown used to. Yeah, good luck. I'm sorry, I took my question time, so if you wanna tell me a shout out now, it's on me. Well, we do have time for just one question, which is very impressive. Thank you very much for this very interesting talk. Quite the loudness, I would say. Quite sorry. A loudness? A loudness? Sure. My God, I understand you want to be provocative, maybe to generate a bit more thinking on these problems, but what are the solutions? Okay, we're a consumption society, we should reduce consumption, perhaps normally it's sure that it will, it's gonna change, but perhaps it's just a process which has geophysical reasons and norms that we've got more positive view or some of the other things. I think we know it's fossil fuels. We know, we're not gonna have that discussion, but what's your question? So what to do now? Oh, what to do, yeah. So, like I said, get to know your neighbors because if the water is outside your fine door, they might have a boat, you need a boat. If I could do one magic wand thing what to do, I would have a change of government policy that would reduce the amount of consumption that we have, this is a carbon tax kind of policy. And the reason I would say that is because the vast majority of humans are too busy to worry about their role in climate change and how they should be changing their behavior. Some of them say, I'm gonna be a vegetarian, I'm not a kid, those people are the enlightened ones but they're a very small percentage. So the vast majority of people, if you change the price of consuming fossil fuels, will consume fewer fossil fuels. Of course, there's countries out there some of you might be from and that subsidize the consumption of fossil fuels it would be more crazy, but whatever that is, that kind of big change would result in many people changing their behavior and reduce the stresses from the over consumption. So that would be my dream, it's very simple, it generates revenue, it's pro-poor, blah blah blah blah, but as I mentioned, there's people like Bermelo. Thank you. I'm sorry, Dr. Zappan, I was very interested in very visual presentation and another keen example of the bridging science of implementation in the field of water food and energy security. So that now brings us to the close of this session of our introduction session and we're now going to proceed to a very short break. We would love to introduce you back at 11.05 and then we can begin our theme sessions, the first theme, the bridging science of implementation and the water food and energy security session. For the long range, I would very much appreciate that you meet with me during the break and the evaluators, if you can just be back just before the session starts, we can distribute the evaluation once, but that's all for now, please enjoy the break and thank you. Enjoy. Thank you.