Lea Kayrouz
TU Delft
As part of the Connected Rivers project, together with Carola Hein, Conor Hunter, and Alankrita Sarkar, we organised a serious game session in Nijmegen in April 2025, using an adapted version of the Water Values game. The goal was to create an engaging and hands-on method for exploring the complexities of water management and climate adaptation, especially along the Rhine. By simulating long-term development over 100 years, the game challenged participants to navigate trade-offs between economic growth, environmental preservation, and climate resilience.
Water challenges operate across multiple geographies, so we structured the game around three scales: the city scale (Nijmegen and the Waal), the regional scale (the Dutch Rhine basin), and the transnational scale (cross-border Rhine dynamics). This multi-scalar approach positioned participants simultaneously as part of the problem and the solution, confronting them with the complexities and contradictions embedded within each scale. It revealed how the shared challenge of climate adaptation takes on different meanings depending on the scale adopted and how priorities, responsibilities, and possible interventions shift accordingly.
Nijmegen sits at a crucial juncture along the Rhine, where the river splits into multiple branches. It has served as a testing ground for innovative climate adaptation strategies. One notable strategy comes from the Room for the River program, which reimagined flood management through landscape transformation. But this transformation is ongoing. As snow-fed river regimes shift to rain-fed patterns, new vulnerabilities, such as droughts and floods, are emerging. These changes affect not only hydrology and navigation but also land use, energy systems, and urban growth.
Against this backdrop, the serious game served as a collaborative tool for imagining adaptive futures. The game also prompted players to reflect on their values and position within their respective water systems. Not every development would be in their favour, yet sometimes compromises were necessary to achieve a sustainable system in the long term, especially in light of changing river regimes and weather patterns.
City Scale: Nijmegen and the Waal
At the city scale, players were faced with a dense and dynamic set of tensions. The Waal and Spiegelwaal are increasingly threatened by both flooding and drought, complicating navigation for ships and heightening risks for residential areas along their banks. These challenges are further exacerbated by the growing number of river users — both commercial shipping and recreational activities — leading to congestion as competing demands on the waterway have intensified since the Room for the River project.
In the game, the players are expected to devise a potential future climate adaptation program that would allocate even more space for water management—transforming agricultural lands into floodplains in ways that would reshape how the river is used and shared among its many stakeholders.
Reflections:
- Understanding local stakeholders takes time, and relationship-building is key.
- Technological, economic, and cultural dynamics are important, but cannot be addressed in isolation.
- A critical challenge remains: how do we create frameworks that support both inclusivity and collaboration in riverfront development?
Regional Scale: The Dutch Rhine
Zooming out to the regional scale, the game focused on erosion and subsidence caused by centuries of dike, lock, and canal construction. These issues now threaten navigation during dry periods while degrading ecological quality across the basin.
Players were challenged to find ways to stabilize the riverbed and enhance drainage and storage capacity to manage extreme water levels. A balanced plan was needed to integrate ecological restoration, flood protection, and economic interests. With farmers at risk of losing land, sustainable alternatives were essential, and achieving them required collaboration between regional stakeholders and government bodies.
Reflections:
- It’s easy to focus on self-interest and lose sight of collective goals.
- Collaboration can reveal solutions to problems, even those caused by prior decisions.
- Riverfronts develop quickly, limiting long-term flexibility.
- Stakeholders often lack the resources, knowledge, or capacity to tackle complex ("slimy") problems, so support and time are essential.
Transnational Scale: Rhine as a Shared System
At the transnational level, sedimentation and hydrological shifts are already disrupting the agreed flow distribution between Rhine branches. Managing a shared resource like the Rhine involves geopolitical and technical challenges, especially as green energy transitions reshape ports, boats, and industrial zones.
In this session, players grappled with questions of cross-border fairness and coordination. How should Nijmegen, Arnhem, and Emmerich respond as water levels and flows shift? Who bears the cost of protection, and who is protected?
Reflections:
- Players enjoyed the session, though many felt the pace was too fast to delve deeply into the nuances at stake.
- Participants humorously accepted flooding the German side to protect Dutch cities, a light-hearted but revealing reminder of how national identities subtly shape game dynamics.
- Strong interest emerged in digitizing the game, which could help clarify development options and improve accessibility.
Final Thoughts
The adapted Water Values game proved to be a valuable platform for dialogue, learning, and imagination. By moving through city, regional, and transnational scales, participants experienced firsthand the complex entanglements of water governance. The game underscored both the urgency and the difficulty of fostering integrated and just climate adaptation strategies across scales. While the format has room for future adaptations, as suggested by participants, it succeeded in sparking collaboration, exposing tensions, and opening up new pathways for shared futures along the Rhine.
Acknowledgements
This blog post has been written in the context of discussions in the LDE PortCityFutures research community. It reflects the evolving thoughts of the authors and expresses the discussions between researchers on the socio-economic, spatial and cultural questions surrounding port city relationships. This blog was edited by the PortCityFutures editorial team: Koen Feenstra, Yi Kwan Chan, and Wenjun Feng.