Floating Future

Climate change and sea-level rise are an increasing pressure on the liveability and safety of our densely populated delta. The Floating Future project aims to provide the next step in the transition from Fighting against Water to Living with Water in the Dutch approach to water management. Floating Future offers new climate-proof space for housing, energy and logistics by creating floating structures.

Both technical and societal breakthroughs are required to achieve upscaling of floating infrastructure. A technical breakthrough is needed to come up with an offshore engineering solution capable of withstanding environmental conditions and provide floating space with a minimal ecological impact. Societal breakthroughs are needed to create governance arrangements for floating islands in inland water and coastal areas, and for societal acceptance of living and working on water. Therefore, the main objective of the Floating Future project is:

“Understanding how upscaling of floating structures could offer a viable and climate-proof solution for space limitations in the Dutch Delta: an interdisciplinary study to enable the upscaling of floating structures for societal, industrial and ecological win-wins.”

Floating developments can be designed to be resilient to sea level rise and can be flexibly relocated. Unique is that we will achieve the project objective with interdisciplinary research linked to industry and societal partners. The work will be divided in three clusters addressing governance, technology, ecology, which relate to interdisciplinary questions. Researchers will collaborate with experienced societal partners to tackle the challenges. Next to scientific output, this will deliver an integrated vision, policy guidelines, design guidelines, project proposals and an inventory of the required resources and milestones to implement the Floating Future in the Dutch delta. Consequently, this project will deliver key insights in the required governance, financial and economic capabilities to realize climate proof floating islands with a positive ecological impact.