From ideas to implementation: lessons from Waterproof Live

More than 400 people gathered at the Fokker Terminal in The Hague for Waterproof 2026. The event is the international meeting place where the Dutch water sector comes together to help shape tomorrow’s water solutions. It also marked the run-up to the UN Water Conference later this year in the United Arab Emirates.

For this special live edition of the Waterproof podcast, produced by Partners for Water, host Tracy Metz recorded in the middle of the event floor. Before introducing her guests, she asked attendees what had brought them there. The answers pointed to one shared concern: are we moving fast enough? “We can move so much faster, and we can only do that through collaboration, through scaling,” said one visitor from the Netherlands Water Partnership. Another, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, put it simply: “We really need each other.”

That sense of urgency ran through conversations with three guests: Neha Mungekar of the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Philip Minderhoud of Wageningen University & Research and Deltares, and Stephen Teeuwen of the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment.

Whose expertise counts?

Neha Mungekar, an architect and urbanist who trained in India before completing her Master’s and PhD in the Netherlands, spoke at Waterproof 2026 about ‘enabling environments’. Her starting point is what she calls the disabling side: water solutions are too often imagined as dikes, dams and pipes – technical fixes designed by engineers, for engineers.

But the people living with a water problem every day are rarely seen as experts. “Ask the homemaker, ask the mother,” Mungekar says. “She will say: when I open the tap, the pressure is not high enough. This is input that we need, but it’s not considered scientific enough.” That lived experience, she argues, is just as important as the technical work of building a pipe or a system. Both to understand the real problem and to check whether a solution is actually working.

Can a delta drown?

That was the title of the talk by Philip Minderhoud, associate professor specialising in land subsidence and relative sea level rise. “Spoiler alert,” he tells Metz, “the answer is yes.”

Subsidence – the gradual sinking of land – is a natural part of how deltas form. But groundwater extraction for agriculture, industry and growing populations is accelerating that process, sometimes by 15 to 20 centimetres a year. Combined with rising sea levels, this produces what Minderhoud calls relative sea level rise: in many deltas, the land is sinking faster than the sea is rising.

The effects can be dramatic and largely invisible. Minderhoud described images from the Philippines where rice fields, once productive, were submerged within a few years – an area more than 20 kilometres from the original coastline, now home to over 300,000 people living inside the tidal zone. “None of the people living in this area were aware that they were sinking,” he says. They blamed sea level rise, flooding or land reclamation, anything but the ground beneath their feet.

“It’s impossible to put a dike around an entire delta system, especially when you have sinking rates that go so fast you don’t have the time to simply adjust to it,” says Minderhoud. The Netherlands had a thousand years to adapt to life below sea level. Many other deltas do not have that time. The good news, he notes, is that subsidence driven by groundwater extraction can be tackled at the source, unlike global climate change, which no single delta can influence on its own. Tokyo and Shanghai successfully slowed their sinking by developing surface water alternatives.

Building trust across borders

Stephen Teeuwen of the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment works in West Africa, supporting governments with sustainable policy development. His organisation does not carry out environmental assessments itself, but helps ensure that the process is done well – including making sure all voices are heard.

In Benin, this meant organising a ‘Tour du Lac’: visits to all eight communities around a lake facing overfishing, pollution and invasive species, to hear directly what local people saw as the most pressing problems and opportunities. The result was a more complete picture: communities needed not only enough fish, but also the infrastructure to store and distribute their catch.

Asked about the most pressing water issue today, Teeuwen points to coordinated groundwater use: “I see a lot of different ministries that have a lot of different plans. These plans are all very important. But if everything is done at the same time without coordination, it’s going to lead to problems.” On a more hopeful note, he highlights a programme in Niger where five sector ministries now sit down together every two to three weeks to coordinate the management of the Niger River. It’s a sign that collaboration, not just technology, is where the real progress will come from.

Cautiously optimistic

Reflecting on the conversations at Waterproof 2026, Metz describes herself as cautiously optimistic. “I am not naive. I know this is an uphill battle,” she says, “but I take strength from the brilliant people I’ve met and spoken with today. They shared their fears and their challenges, but they also shared their ideas and their actual, workable, actionable solutions.” Whether it is rethinking who counts as an expert, tackling subsidence at its source, or building trust between institutions, the message from Waterproof Live is consistent: implementation depends as much on people and collaboration as it does on technology.

What does it take, in your experience, to move a good water idea from the drawing board to lasting implementation?