The Municipality of Middelburg (NL), like all European cities, has the mission to become a climate-neutral municipality by 2050. To achieve this goal, extensive efforts are being made across various sustainability themes, including climate adaptation. To further enhance the integrated approach to climate adaptation within the municipality and in collaboration with other governmental bodies, the municipality of Middelburg has become a project partner in the Interreg North Sea Region project, Green Team.
In this interview, alderman Jeroen Louws discusses the importance of integral collaboration and the synergies between different policies and themes within the municipality.
What do you see as the added value of developing and embedding an internal, integrated collaboration on climate adaptation?
"The municipality of Middelburg, like other governments worldwide, faces major challenges, from the energy transition to climate adaptation. To achieve our long-term goals, it is crucial to make decisions now that will enable continuous progress. As a municipality, we are already making good strides in this direction. For instance, we have adopted our Environmental Vision 2050, which states that we will focus even more on key sustainability themes. Additionally, we have determined that climate adaptation must be integrated into all policy areas. This has been translated into various policy documents and projects. A concrete example is our Road Management Plan 2024–2033, which stipulates that sustainability themes must be considered in the planning and execution of maintenance and redevelopment projects.
Working towards these long-term goals does not stop at policy formulation. The next step is policy implementation, which is the responsibility of all our employees. That is why integral, cross-departmental collaboration is so important. Different departments are already working hard on these challenges, but integrated collaboration is not yet structurally embedded in the organisation. It happens, but not always automatically. The added value of the Green Team project is that it allows us to develop a method or approach that will help us embed and organise this collaboration more effectively."
Could you explain the synergies between the different policies and themes and the objective of the Green Team project?
"The municipality of Middelburg is working on a wide range of sustainability themes, from climate adaptation to the energy transition and circularity. Each of these themes presents different challenges. In many projects, you work towards a clear endpoint, but with major challenges that have long-term objectives, this is often not the case. As I mentioned earlier, it is essential to make the right choices now for the years ahead, which requires a different way of working towards goals.
The Green Team project not only focuses on the objectives of this specific project but also explores how we can work as efficiently as possible on broader themes such as climate adaptation. By participating in European projects — where the main goal is to learn from each other and jointly develop methods — the knowledge gained can also be applied to other sustainability themes. By collaborating not only across departments but also internationally, we can gain new insights. As the municipality of Middelburg, we want to both learn from these new insights and share the outcomes of such projects with other municipalities.
In short, as an organisation, we are already on the right path and working increasingly in an integrated way. Sharing knowledge and experiences and further developing a general working method will help us advance our ambitions for this municipality."