God made Earth, the saying goes, and the Dutch made the Netherlands. But they haven’t stopped just there. The marvels of Dutch engineering go much beyond the protective barriers, or dikes, that stand guard against flooding in the vast swathes of the country that were reclaimed from the sea and lie below sea level.
In fact, one of those marvels is an office that needn’t worry about rising sea levels at all — a palpable threat in an extreme weather world — since it’s been built to float on water.
Floating office
Made from recyclable materials and wood that can be reused, the Floating Office Rotterdam (FOR) is a carbon-neutral three storey building that utilises various sustainable design principles. It sits on the Nieuwe Maas river and is designed to float if water levels rise due to climate change. FOR uses solar panels to generate its own energy and uses water from the Rijnhaven harbour for interior cooling. It appropriately houses the headquarters of the Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA), which works on solutions for climate change.
The makers might have thought of leaving nothing to chance when they came up with the idea for a climate-friendly floating office. But it is exactly the kind of comprehensive climate thinking that the Netherlands loves to practise. It may not be entirely wrong to say that some are actually eating and living it. Because the ‘Green Village’ on the Delft University of Technology (TU) campus in Delft has a ‘living lab’ for sustainability where people can reside while testing innovations ranging from sustainable building and renovation to future energy systems and climate-adaptive cities.
If there’s living space for environmental science, Netherlands has also created ‘Room for the River’. It’s a project that seeks to transform agricultural areas into flood plains to enhance water management and, in the process, reduce the risk of flooding by giving rivers more room to flood.
Future ready
Thinking out of the box may not be a bad bet for coming up with ideas for sustainable living. It’s even better if the box itself is designed to be future ready. Which is what the future residents of the Lanxmeer got down to do. They came up with the masterplan and every other detail of their unique neighbourhood in the town of Culemborg that incorporates principles of eco-towns and features reusable materials and an urban ecological farm. The residents themselves maintain a park in the neighbourhood that’s equipped with an integrated water concept featuring retention pools, helophyte filters, and WADIs (Water Drainage Infiltration).
Built on former farmland surrounding a protected drinking water extraction area, Lanxmeer brings together facilities for recreation, water extraction, and food production whilst showcasing sustainable urban planning.
The Dutch are confident that their learnings from climate adaptation will be helpful if widely shared, especially for a country like India, which faces its own share of environmental threats. Officials at the Netherlands Embassy in India said that “key organisations from both nations are exchanging ideas and best practices on water management, climate adaptation, and sustainability”. Such collaborations show how Dutch innovation can contribute to India’s, and the world’s, long-term resilience in the face of climate change, they said.
The writer was in The Hague at the invitation of the Netherlands ministry of foreign affairs.
