How is the Port of Rotterdam adapting its logistics to rising sea levels?

“Living with water rather than fighting it,” Eveline Bronsdijk, Rotterdam’s urban development advisor, recommended in an interview with France Inter in November 2019. As sea levels rise due to global warming, water management is becoming a concern for a growing number of people around the world—particularly logistics stakeholders, who could be heavily affected. According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), maritime transport accounts for 80% of global trade by volume. As Europe’s leading port, located in a country where one-quarter of the land lies 6 meters below sea level, Rotterdam has long learned to manage water through dikes, canals, polders, and even stretches of dunes... But the city continues to seek new solutions in the face of a situation that is unlikely to improve. 

By 2100, sea levels could rise by 1 to 1.5 meters, according to a study published in 2017 by researchers at Utrecht University. “International delegations regularly visit the Netherlands to learn from a country that reclaimed one-third of its territory from the North Sea,” noted a report broadcast on France Inter in 2019. “Dutch experts are also called on in Louisiana, Indonesia, and Vietnam. After typhoons, hurricanes, or cyclones, they help rebuild and redesign cities, drawing on their ten centuries of experience.” In the 1990s, Rotterdam also built the Maeslantkering to protect itself from rising waters and the violent weather events expected to become more frequent in the years ahead. Located around 30 kilometers from the port, this gigantic metal robot consists of two enormous barriers that close automatically during severe storms to keep the city dry. During storm season, which begins on October 1 and ends in mid-April, the computer receives new information every ten minutes, 24 hours a day. It continuously processes data on water levels and weather forecasts from stations across Europe. When it detects severe storms and a high tidal coefficient, it recognizes the dangerous combination and triggers the closure. 

But for Rotterdam, which could also face threats from rivers swelling due to melting snow and glaciers, the challenge is not only to fight water, but also to live with it. The city is therefore dredging riverbeds, widening them, and even creating new river branches. The same approach applies to rainwater, which is collected in “Water Plazas”: in dry periods, these sunken public squares serve as playgrounds, basketball courts, and skate parks; during downpours, they become genuine reservoirs. The largest of these squares, for example, can hold up to 1.5 million liters of water. Eveline Bronsdijk thus speaks of the city’s “sponge” function, which also includes rain gardens to encourage water infiltration into the soil, as well as systems that store water on rooftops to delay its release into the sewers. For every renovation project undertaken by the city, solutions are considered that incorporate water issues, whether to limit flooding or combat drought. 

From the United States to Asia, via Europe, every country can sense the threat approaching. For example, the Mekong Delta in Vietnam could disappear beneath the waters within a hundred years if nothing is done. In 2021, during COP26, Tuvalu’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Simon Kofe made a lasting impression by delivering his speech in a suit, standing ankle-deep in water, to raise the alarm about the climate emergency. In Singapore, the government created a special unit of around 40 specialist scientists in 2019 to protect its threatened coastline: seawalls, protective barriers, dams, tidal locks... This small state’s climate budget is estimated at €70 billion for the next 50 to 100 years. 

Logistics stakeholders also have a role to play when designing sites and implementing innovative stormwater-management systems... if they are given the opportunity to assume that responsibility. (see link to the Plateformes article on the Afilog conference on stormwater)