Exchange in Ghent
Three days on flooding and climate in Ghent, ending with a letter to policymakers.
- When
- 8 to 10 May 2026
- Where
-
Ghent, Belgium
- Who
- 14 participants
- Cost
- No fee; travel, a place to sleep and meals arranged
- Theme
- Flood management, climate adaptation and citizen participation
- Result
- A letter to policymakers and three sets of recommendations
What we did
Our last exchange with this group, planned around what participants asked for after Zeeland: more depth, more fieldwork, more politics.
On Friday, Filip Watteeuw, deputy mayor of Ghent, told us that redesigning a city is more about people than about technology. Think protests, court cases, even death threats. Anyone who makes decisions needs empathy, he said.
On Saturday we met Max Verdonck of De Vlaamse Waterweg, the Flemish waterways agency. He took us through the Scheldt's history, the work going on now and the flood defences still to come. The hardest part of his job: not the engineering, but getting people and politicians to accept big projects. In the afternoon we cycled out to see the city's low-lying areas, buffer zones and nature-based solutions for ourselves.
Then, in three teams, we turned all this into recommendations on:
- natural and technical flood defences, combined in layers
- public space that is climate resilient and good to live in
- how rainfall flooding, river flooding and cross-border decisions interact
On Sunday the teams presented their results and we wrote a joint letter to policymakers. Then we went kayaking.
You have to try to mobilise the people who support what you do, because the people who disagree will often be the loudest voices, even if they are a minority.
In pictures
Read the letter to policymakers
The full letter, and the three groups' recommendations that we took to the International Scheldt Commission.
Read the letter