Environmental cooperation with the United States
The U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration (FWHA) and Rijkswaterstaat work together on a number of issues through the Memorandum of Cooperation.
Sharing knowledge
The resilience and adaptation of transport infrastructure to extreme weather events has been a cooperation topic since October 2013. This has resulted in an exchange of knowledge, approaches, frameworks, reports and other relevant information.
Resilience and adaptation of transport infrastructure
The exchange on the topic of resilience has resulted in mutual sharing of knowledge, experience and information in this area of work, such as vulnerability and risk assessment, identifying and adaptation measures and mainstreaming resilience in asset management. This has resulted in a more complete set of knowledge, to the point where we are ready on both sides of the ocean to implement this expertise in projects and integrate it into working practices.
This has been already been demonstrated in projects on both sides.
Experience and learning
The shared knowledge and experience is being used to improve the quality of projects and to increase the learning effect. For example, information has been exchanged on the Dutch stress test of the national road network and frameworks developed by FWHA.
The actual cooperation in projects in the United States has been achieved by involving road authorities and knowledge centres in Washington State and North Carolina.
The focus is on adapting roads to climate change, with sub-themes such as asset management, sustainability and nature-based solutions.