ClimateCafé is a dynamic community of several international organisations working in a climate cafe setting. Our community includes senior consultants, designers, developers, policy experts, community organizers, environmental scientists, journalists, activists, and many more. We seek to educate and inspire tech and non-tech people alike. There is a lot to do, and no matter what you know, you can help. Looking to collaborate with Climatecafe? We partner with nonprofits, governments, and community advocates on technology projects. Please contact us with more information about your idea. Join us at www.climatescan.org or go to our contact page… We need you. For info follow us on twitter: @ClimateCafe_NL or facebook: https://www.facebook.com/climateScanNL

Meet the ClimateCafé Team!

Floris Boogaard

Professor Dr.ir. Floris Boogaard is a co-founder of ClimateCafe and has over 20 years experience with climate adaptation in Europe, Africa and Asia. His general research and advice fields include climate adaptation, urban water quality management and urban water management planning using tools as www.climatescan.org and www.climatecafe.nl. Floris is co founder of ClimateCafe after early (inter)national try outs in Asia and The Netherlands (Groningen area) where in a short period of time (1-2 weeks) essential data by young professionals and practitioners where gathered to enable assess the level of climate adaptation.

Rick Heikoop

Rick Heikoop – Senior lecturer Water Management at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences and project manager at RDM Centre of Expertise. Rick has a 15+ years record of achievement and demonstrated success in initiating, managing and leading (international) collaborations and partnerships in the water sector in triple helix setup. Rick was co founder of the formula of ClimateCafe to assess the ‘level of resilience’ of a specific street, neighborhood or city with low-cost and low-tech tools and instruments with the aim to create awareness and formulate concrete actions to make resilient cities which were organized in Manila, Cebu City and Rotterdam. Read more about the City Climatescan pilots Manila, Cebu, Semarang and Rotterdam in the post of this website. Read the interview

Lotte de Jong

I focus on the participative method of Climatecafe, which aims at accelerating global climate adaptation amongst youth. Furthermore, contribute to the EU project SENSES in which the focus is to make climate change scenarios accessible for users by co-production. During my first years on the planet, I got inspired by other countries and cultures. I grew up in Central-America until I was a toddler and developed an interest in building and teamwork. Lotte participated in climatecafe Manila in 2016 and was in the coordinator of climatecafe Piura, Peru in 2019. More about Lotte in this GCA publication: https://gca.org/ylp-testimonials/lotte-de-jong

Allard Roest

Allard Hans Roest, Msc. is a project leader and researcher at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences and PhD student at the University of Groningen. His research focusses on the institutional and spatial factors that make or break climate adaptation in the urban environment and the (governance) instruments that can aid in accelerating climate change adaptation. In his research and work, Allard has a particular interest in the means by which pubic and private stakeholders can collaborate in relationship to the spatial transformation for climate adaptation. Literally looking over the hedge to identify the opportunities for spatial transformations and the ways through which these spaces can be used for climate adaptation. For instance through the greening of gardens or implementing water-permeable parking spaces. Allard believes it is fundamental that stakeholders share knowledge and work together in relationship to climate change adaptation and sees climatecafés as a meaningful method to facilitate and start this collaboration. By bringing together local knowledge from residents, information on governance and measures from practitioners and academic knowledge on best management practices, more local and inclusive adaptation plans and designs can be made, which is a key factor in successful adaptation.

Gabriela Milyanova

Gabriela Milyanova works in the field of climate adaptation for the Hanze University in Groningen. There, she focuses on developing a learning community on climate adaptation (IWP) that connects students, researchers and practitioners around the topic. Next to that, she is working in the program team of the Climate Adaptation Week 2020. Gabriela has a background as a designer creating awareness on the impact that creativity can have on tackling big societal issues such as climate change. She has created and taught two courses for art and design students within Academie Minerva on the topic of sustainability. Combining both her background and her current job, she focuses on incorporating design thinking methodology within the climate café structure. These design thinking tools promote creativity and help students in the climate café come up with innovative ideas and incorporate art and design to prototype and communicate them.

Rui Lima

Rui is currently a researcher/engineer at Indymo (Innovative Dynamic Monitoring), and at MARE (Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre). Inspired by the need to understand and characterize water systems in order to effectively design and implement climate adaptation measures, Rui is enthusiastically seeking new opportunities and technologies that may result in novel environmental monitoring methods, such as autonomous mapping of water quality or scanning of underwater ecology/habitat and sediments. Rui has extensive experience in integrating and using sensors and unmanned vehicles (underwater and surface drones) to collect three dimensional data sets of water quality. He works closely with water managers and tries to find monitoring solutions that fits their needs, and that can generate unique datasets that are aimed at supporting climate adaptation and water management decisions. Rui is pursuing a PhD on innovative monitoring tools, which includes field applications in The Netherlands, Mali (Africa), Myanmar/Vietnam/Indonesia (Asia) and Peru (South America). Read more about Rui’s research here.

Ronald Hemel

Ronald Hemel has over 20 years of experience in complex water management projects, mainly in the field of climate adaptation, energy transition and innovation. He connects people and their institutions to accelerate projects for a more sustainable living environment. He has worked with universities, knowledge institutes, consultancies and private and public companies in the internatonal water sector. Within his company Waterprof he is training young professionals and students to become the future proces and program managers in the water sector. Ronald is focused on professionalising the concept of ClimateCafe and its expansion as the global learning community on climate adaptation.

Sidney Jon Stax

As an aquatic ecological and technical water manager Sidney has a broad experience local and regional greenblue management, civil enginering, ecological systems, GIS, and biochemical processes. Not surprisingly Sidney focusses on integral processes and knowledge development for his city Nijmegen and beyond. “A phonecall on a typical work day can be about a citizen in need of help with waterproblems in his street, while the next phone call can be from the ministries to talk about policy on climate adaptation”. Even though he mostly works in the field of application and management, scientific research is still in his blood. Therefore Sidney is working on sientific research on bluegreen and sewer climate adaptation measures (including supervision of internships). How do greenblue systems work on long periods and how can they function optimal in an ever changing, semi-crowded city as Nijmegen where both drought and to much water are challenges that needs to be asserted? Sidney is also part of several other knowledge platforms (Invasive Lobsters and climate change, COP-wave Infiltration pavement and Spiegelwaal warning systems) and regulary works with students from colleges and universities.

Britta Restemeyer

Dr. Britta Restemeyer is a post-doc researcher at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen (the Netherlands). In my PhD research I have focused on the concepts of flood resilience and adaptive water governance and how these concepts can be brought into practice in order to climate-proof urban areas. As a member of the ClimateCafé community, I am happy that I can take this a step further and actively discuss climate challenges in specific cases and develop potential solutions together with local and regional stakeholders. I believe that ClimateCafés are a great method to make climate adaptation more tangible and make it fun – two essential elements to move to climate action.

And many others!