This study identifies key factors for integrating the WhereWeMove game into municipal flood risk communication and collaboration strategies. The game started as a research initiative to support the design of adaptation policy by helping risk management organizations to explore how risk perception and resources shape players’ adaptation choices. During the game rounds, players take the role of a homeowner to learn about their choices given the available game resources and adaptation options. After the gameplay, participants discuss the relations between their game and real-life choices to envision strategies to strengthen homeowners’ capacities. By considering that government organizations often hesitate to adopt innovations according to their available resources, we carried out semi-structured interviews with two municipalities and a province representative to explore their adoption intentions and needs. Thereby, we identified which factors to finetune in the game prototype or pursue at the adopting organizations to use the game in the municipal communication and collaboration strategies. On one side, successful adoption depends on integrating the game into a broader communication strategy aligned with the adaptation priorities across government levels. Conversely, adequate municipal resources and expertise, as well as the game’s ease of use, local relevance, and sufficient data privacy, are required to make the gameplay part of municipal efforts. Adoption is initially considered with a dedicated group contributing to the design of government policies to observe policy-related effects and outputs. Players are conceived as a limited group of professionals and representatives of residents or an advisory organization at the municipality or province. ... Read more

ΔENIGMA is a national research infrastructure with various work packages (WP) studying the water and sediment dynamics for nature-based, flexible, and adaptive flood risk management in the Dutch Delta's river-estuary-coast continuum. WP6 joins efforts between TUDelft, Wageningen, Twente, and Deltares Labs to study and facilitate interactions bridging related knowledgecommunication- action gaps. The WP6 designs various tools, such as serious games, using digital and physical interfaces to facilitate collaborations between societal and academic actors while joining efforts within, across, and beyond WPs. Collaborative interactions are considered productive when achieving individual, group, and societal learning about the problem and proposed solutions, the norms and values behind, and the necessary (collective) action f (Barth et al., 2023). This paper presents the TU Delft Game Lab+’s prototype, developed with ΔENIGMA WP2 and TU Delft Serious Game Design students (Kontaxopoulou et al., 2024). ... Read more

The global shift against diversity underscores universities' vital role in embracing diversity beyond mere representation. A key challenge is recognizing diversity beyond cross-cultural boundaries of, for example, gender, ethnicity or nationality. We suggest universities to foster an intercultural approach that recognizes the co-existence of multiple forms of difference and the agency of continuously shaping one’s identity. By fostering the development of a diversity competence throughout and beyond the curriculum, we envision universities not only as places for learning how to make projects or innovations on time, on budget, and with functional quality. Universities are also places for reflecting on which type of society these projects contribute to and what role one plays. Do we want a society and engineers that build bridges between people or set walls between them? Overlooking diversity in the engineering practice can lead to growing pressures overtime within and between diverse groups. We write this manifesto from our teaching experience about intercultural relations. First, we outline the impact of ignoring diversity on sustainable development. Then, we discuss diversity in theory and how our technical university embraces it. Finally, we reflect on the students’ perspectives on our attempts to shift from managing diversity to developing competencies. We call for each course and project where teamwork occurs to facilitate a safe and reflective environment to approach, analyse, and act upon diversity at three levels: at the professional level, by recognizing how (technical) work involves both making and caring; at the project level, by navigating biases and teamwork challenges; and at the societal level, by recognizing the project's (unintended) impact and role. ... Read more

Transdisciplinary research requires improved knowledge exchange between science and practice. Such improvements include diversifying and scaling up knowledge accessing and sharing through online platforms. We conducted twenty interviews informed by behavioral science methods to clarify the aim, components, and participants' perspectives on the usefulness of the proposed components for an envisioned platform. Participants were members of a Dutch community of practice for river studies and a research programme into integrated and collaborative management. The proposed concept included storylines, data repositories, user profiles, interactive visualisations, and collaborative sessions. Interview results include drivers and barriers from prospective users that we translated into requirements to increase the potential adoption and effective use of online platforms with similar components. From the experiences with implementing these requirements, we provide recommendations for enabling primary drivers: (i) Combining online and offline interactions to provide various options for knowledge exchange between disciplines and organisations. (ii) Sharing the content and application of the research with a non-scientific audience. (iii) Reusing existing online platforms as much as possible without restricting any to improve the reuse of research methods and results. We further provide recommendations to overcome the main barriers: (i) Partnering with various communities to extend knowledge exchange. (ii) Following a participatory approach to improve the design and content while considering the time and resources that such a process entails. (iii) Providing flexible options to contribute and tailor overviews of available knowledge in different ways according to prospective users' roles in practice. (iv) Purposefully facilitating online interactions according to the transdisciplinary process-intended attributes. ... Read more

Calls for transformative change and participatory modes of knowledge production demand researchers to assume new roles. This paper synthesizes the literature on knowledge co-production and researcher roles to explore challenges for researchers involved in transdisciplinary environmental management projects. Our research methods combine a scoping review and reflections on personal experiences with three transdisciplinary projects. To conceptualize researcher roles in transdisciplinary knowledge co-production, we distinguish between three spaces: knowledge, formal policy, and stakeholder. Knowledge co-production requires collaboration between actors from different spaces and integration of diverse knowledge sources and types. Depending on whether researchers adopt knowledge-oriented, change-oriented or intermediating roles, they will experience different challenges. When researchers combine knowledge development with change-oriented and/or intermediating roles, they encounter new challenges, such as, maintaining independence or objectivity. To assist researchers in transdisciplinary projects, we conclude with a checklist of four elements to reflect upon: orientation, norms and values, expectations and resources. ... Read more

The Dutch rivers are subject to a wide range of measures. Room for the River projects reduce flood risk, removal of bank protection enhances ecology, sediment nourishments benefit navigation. The STW research programme RiverCare (2014-2019) studies the long-term effects of these measures. This article highlights the RiverCare projects of four TU Delft-related researchers. ... Read more

This thesis describes the development and testing of a methodology to use information collected by volunteers and technicians on the status of hydraulic structures, applicable for day-to-day risk management. The study was performed in the northeastern Italian Alps of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region. A decision support method was developed and implemented by means of a prototype Web-GIS application. The methodology ensures that technicians in charge can systematically evaluate inspection reports coming from either volunteers or technicians. As such, the study deals with the fields of citizen science and risk management of hydro-meteorological hazards. Concerning citizen science, the thesis studied the quality of visual inspections by volunteers of hydraulic structures that protect society against debris flows. Debris flows are flows of water, sediment and debris down a stream channel that can occur suddenly. Concerning risk management, this thesis looked at collaboration between managing organizations and local volunteers in collecting data on the status of protecting structures such as check-dams. In the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, protection against debris flows is particularly complex due to the abundance and variety of protecting structures. Furthermore, the budget for risk management in general is decreasing while the need is only increasing, due to environmental change. To facilitate collaboration, trade-offs between the motivations of volunteers, scientific goals and management goals will have to be made. It is recommended to team up volunteers with technicians in an extensive training period. In this way, volunteers can become capable inspectors of hydraulic structures ... Read more

First-level inspections could be provided by skilled volunteers or technicians to pre-screen the functional status of check dams. This paper discusses the design and testing of a support method in collaboration with the responsible technicians in evaluating inspection reports. Reports are based on linguistic rating scales that are systematically aggregated into indices by means of a multi-criteria TOPSIS method with fuzzy terms. The aggregation procedure is carried out for three parameters representing the structure’s status while highlighting any lack of completeness of inspection reports. The method was evaluated using inspection reports collected during a workshop in the Fella basin in the Italian Alps. The method allows the responsible technicians to set rules to categorise the aggregated indices in one of three levels, each corresponding with a course of action. Rules were useful to categorise the aggregated indices according to the structure’s status. Disagreements on rating defects suggest that a weighted aggregation procedure to calculate the indices might lead to overestimating or underestimating defects. Complementary data from historical inspections or remote sensing are required to initiate specific actions. The method can be applied to pre-screen different types of hydraulic structures after adaptation to the local conditions and functional requirements. ... Read more

This paper presents an approach to enhance the role of local stakeholders in dealing with urban floods. The concept is based on the DIANE-CM project (Decentralised Integrated Analysis and Enhancement of Awareness through Collaborative Modelling and Management of Flood Risk) of the 2nd ERANET CRUE funding initiative. The main objective of the project was to develop and test an advanced methodology for enhancing the resilience of local communities to flooding. Through collaborative modelling, a social learning process was initiated that enhances the social capacity of the stakeholders due to the interaction process. The other aim of the project was to better understand how data from hazard and vulnerability analyses and improved maps, as well as from the near real-time flood prediction, can be used to initiate a public dialogue (i.e. collaborative mapping and planning activities) in order to carry out more informed and shared decision-making processes and to enhance flood risk awareness. The concept of collaborative modelling was applied in two case studies: (1) the Cranbrook catchment in the UK, with focus on pluvial flooding; and (2) the Alster catchment in Germany, with focus on fluvial flooding. As a result of the interactive and social learning process, supported by sociotechnical instruments, an understanding of flood risk was developed amongst the stakeholders and alternatives for flood risk management for the respective case study area were jointly developed and ranked as a basis for further planning and management. ... Read more