Country coverage: Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, UK,Norway, France, Denmark, Sweden Indonesia and Vietnam
Field of expertise: Flood management
Email: s.vanherk@baxwillems.eu
Sebastiaan van Herk is partner and senior consultant at Bax&Willems. Since 2003, he has defined, executed and coordinated Open Innovation, R&D, NBD and policy projects for various industrial multinational and SME companies; governmental bodies at different administrative levels; and research institutes, including several European and Global collaborative projects. Mr. van Herk mainly works in the domains of: environment; water, infrastructure and construction, but has occasionally delivered projects in eg energy and ICT, broadening his experience in effective collaboration early in his career.
Sebastiaan is a founding member and part-time researcher at the Flood Resilience Group at UNESCO-IHE on governance, collaboration, learning and transitions in flood management, climate adaptation and urban planning. He has been appointed UNDRR (United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction) campaign Advocate for Resilient Cities. He also contributes to educational; training; and capacity building programmes. He is an experienced speaker and facilitator of workshops at international conferences (approximately 4-6 per year).
Sebastiaan van Herk holds a joint PhD degree from UNESCO-IHE and Delft University of Technology and an MSc degree (cum laude) in systems engineering and policy analysis from Delft University of Technology (2003). He studied industrial engineering at the UPC Barcelona and economics at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam.Previously Mr. van Herk worked 2 years in R&D and NBD departments in the construction industry at HILTI AG (Liechtenstein) and Dura Vermeer Group (Holland) respectively.
Sebastiaan van Herk speaks English, Spanish, German, Dutch and Catalan fluently and has notions of French.
Campaign Activities-
motivated cities in EU to join campaign, amongst whom 2 first cities from the Netherlands
- expert support to Barcelona, Spain, on increasing resilience
- arranged UNESCO-IHE (largest water education institute in the world) as partner of campaign
- contribution to new research line at UNESCO-IHE at the flood resilience group combining Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction for Resilient Cities.
- review of ‘old’ 10 essentials and contribution to new
- consulting support to Resilient Cities Connect, for cities to business links and city-to-city learning
- community events on flood management, linked to campaign, most recently ‘water week’ and ‘national water exposition’.
- EU Interreg project on resilience cities, endorsed by UNDRR , with projectpartnersthatcomprisecities in the UK, Norway, Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands
- Link to other networks, eg Rockefeller 100RC