In a country where much of the land lies below sea level, survival has always been a collective effort. For centuries, the Dutch have joined forces to manage water — from early local water boards to today’s national programmes for flood safety, drought management and urban planning. That tradition of cooperation has shaped how the Netherlands deals with risk: not by avoiding it, but by sharing it.
At the Planetary Health Conference 2025 in Rotterdam, that mindset was at the heart of a panel hosted by the Resilient Delta initiative. The session brought together experts from across the financial landscape, from public investment and insurance to law and academia, to explore one question: how can we finance adaptation to water risk in fair and sustainable ways? “It’s an existential question for us,” said Martijn Looijer of the National Delta Programme, which coordinates long-term climate adaptation across the Netherlands. “We can only live here if we act together. The Delta Programme brings together municipalities, water authorities and the national government. We strongly rely on science, but also on a shared commitment to keep the country safe.”
"Shared effort can make sustainability real"
The principle of cooperation as a condition for safety runs through Dutch institutions. The NWB Bank, founded by the water authorities in the 1950s, provides low-cost loans for public projects, from dykes to housing and healthcare. “We were built to make the public sector resilient,” said Hielke van der Aa, sustainability analyst at the NWB Bank. “It’s in our DNA to look at risk collectively, and to finance solutions that serve the public good.” For Harold Hendriks of Univé, a cooperative insurance company with roots in the agricultural sector, the same logic applies at the local level. “We’re not a chatbot company — we’re in the neighborhood,” he said. “We believe in dreaming big, but acting small. A lot of innovation happens in neighborhoods: in local energy cooperatives, in small projects where people take responsibility together. That’s where you see how shared effort can make sustainability real.”
"The solidarity mindset opens up many possibilities"
Siobhán Airey, Assistant Professor at Erasmus School of Law, studies the legal and institutional challenges of some such collaborations. She pointed to an example close to home: where a community organisation wants to form an energy cooperative on Rotterdam’s Noordereiland, place solar panels on the roof of a large privately-owned apartment building and use the income to lower energy bills for social housing tenants. “It’s a simple idea, but it shows how law and lawyers need to innovate to support community-led responses” she said. “In the Netherlands, we have a long history of community-led responses to water risk, and that solidarity mindset opens up many possibilities that doesn’t occur in conventional thinking on public-private partnerships today.” And for Zac Taylor, Assistant Professor at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment and academic lead at Resilient Delta, this Dutch tradition points to a broader global lesson. “No single institution can solve systemic challenges alone,” he said. “But when researchers, financiers and public actors work collectively, we can design futures that are both resilient and fair.”
The session’s conclusion was clear: financing a safer future is not just a technical or financial challenge, it’s a societal and institutional one. To invest in resilience means to invest in institutionalising the relationships that hold societies together, based on trust and solidarity.
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Zac Taylor, Siobhán Airey, Martijn Looijer, Harold Hendriks and Hielke van der Aa were part of the plenary session “De-Risking Planetary Health: driving the transition in an uncertain world” at the Planetary Health Conference in Rotterdam (7 – 10 October 2025). The panel was hosted by the Resilient Delta initiative, part of the Convergence alliance between Erasmus University Rotterdam, Delft University of Technology and Erasmus Medical Center.
