Chris Zevenbergen is a Professor at the Water Engineering Department of IHE Delft and at the Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering of the TU Delft, The Netherlands. He is a visiting professor at the Southeast University (SEU), China. He is also Project Director of DeltaCap, a Capacity Development Program funded by the Dutch Government to support the implementation of the Delta Plan in Bangladesh, and of AFMA, a seven year SWF program to develop and implement Anticipatory Flood Risk Management in Alexandria, Egypt. As of 2016, he is advisor of Bax & Company (Barcelona, Spain), a leading European innovation consultancy. From 1999 to 2012 he was Director Research and Development and member of the Management Team of the Dura Vermeer Group NV, one of the largest contractors in The Netherlands. He was a Member of the Board of the Public Private Innovation Platform Clean Tech Delta, The Netherlands in 2013 and 2014.
Prof. Zevenbergen worked as a researcher on various environmental issues related to the building industry, such as environmental impact assessments, product development, emission modeling, testing procedures, building codes and guidelines in the 1980s, followed by 25 years international research and consultancy in environmental engineering and water management. In the past 20 years he has accumulated extensive national and international research experience with integrated approaches to manage floods in urban environments.
His research interest is specifically on:
- innovative concepts to mitigate urban flood impacts
- on flood proofing building designs and technologies
- on decision support tool development in urban planning with practical application in urban flood management.
He has a strong affinity with the ecological, socio-economic, institutional aspects of urban planning and water management. He has worked extensively on application of theories of resilience to flood risk management systems, including the theory of socio-ecological resilience.
Chris Zevenbergen has published/edited five books (of which one text book on Urban Flood Management, Taylor & Francis) and more than 100 scientific publications in the field of environmental engineering and urban flood management. He was co-founder and chairman of the European Network COST C22 on Urban Flood Management. He has founded and chairs the Flood Resilience chair group (FRG) of IHE Delft. He participates in various national and international advisory boards of governmental and scientific institutions (e.g. Global Center of Excellence of Climate Adaptation, Delta Alliance, Evaluation Dutch Delta Program, Evaluation Room for the River Program, IPCC EM Infra, Rotterdam Climate Proof, Environmental Science Group Wageningen, iBuild, DLR Future Mega Cities, EPSRC, the Dutch Knowledge for Climate Program.
Chris Zevenbergen is also involved in a new interdisciplinary research area at IHE Delft, Urban Water Accounting. Read more here.
Publications
A complete list of publications can be found in Google Scholar.