Joost van Arkel

Could you introduce yourself to us?

My name is Joost van Arkel, a recent graduate from TU Delft. I grew up in The Hague, but I am currently living in Rotterdam. At the University of Delft, I did my bachelors Civiele techniek (Civil Engineering) and my masters Waterbouwkunde (Hydraulic Engineering). During my years in University, I have gained experience within different projects and courses, mainly focusing on dredging and coastal engineering. One of my main interests within these projects is building with nature, due to the possibility of creating positive value for nature and socio-economics.

What is your connection to Van Oord/Ocean Health?

My study hydraulic engineering has a perfect link to Van Oord, that focusses partially on dredging and offshore engineering. I graduated from my masters with a project that I was doing within Van Oord. During the 11 months that I was working for van Oord, I worked mainly within the Environmental Engineering department, which was a great experience. The project that I was working on, partially fitted within the Environmental Engineering department, but also partially in the Ocean Health department. To me, Van Oord is a great company that makes me very excited about creating marine infrastructure.

Can you tell us more about your graduation project?

My thesis is about creating nature inclusive potential of marine infrastructure, with the focus on coral. We often see that when companies want to build marine infrastructure near the coast, such as beach nourishments, breakwaters or harbors, ecosystems may come under pressure. For my thesis, I came up with a systematic approach to structure the discussion between stakeholders in order to add value to nature by building marine infrastructure.

For this, I flew to St. Eustatius and stayed there for a few months to create this systematic approach. I did research on corals within the area, focused on the extension of the breakwater in the harbor and I had discussions with ecologists living there.

Why did you go into this project?

So, my interest lies both on ecology and hydraulic engineering. Within my studies, I found out that I was mostly interested in the building with nature course. From the moment I took related courses, I knew I wanted to do something within this field.

Within the news and online, I came across many situations in which marine infrastructure did harm coral and coral reefs all around the world. I find it very important to do good for the environment and improve the health of nature. That’s why I decided to lay focus on coral in specific. Together with Martin Kershaw, Operations Manager at the Ocean Health team, I started working on this project, which eventually was a great experience.

What are the main results from your graduation project?

What I tried to achieve with this project was to find out if there is a suitable method for marine infrastructure projects to also potentially create coral value. I firstly found out that there wasn’t any existing method. I therefore developed my own method in which I found a possibility in developing coral by creating profitable circumstances and alter the design of marine infrastructure. The goal of the method was to provide guidance to the discussion between stakeholders with different perspectives. By using the case study, that I did in St. Eustatius, I proved that this method was possible and that stakeholders can more easily structure their discussions. This was one of the results of this research.

Other examples of results focused on the use of different substrates. Within the hydraulic environment there are hard and soft substrates. Soft engineering is the engineering that focusses for instance on beach nourishments, so soft soils. Coral always needs hard substrate to grow on and is therefore not a good fit for soft substrates. For soft engineering, we should be focusing on mitigation measures, so reducing the damage.

If we look at hard substrates, we see that it is surely possibly to work with coral and that many opportunities open up in this field. This results that hard substrates, such as rocks, are providing great opportunities to develop coral with potential measures named in my research.

Furthermore, It is important to first check the local environmental conditions and then create a suitable environment for coral development. After that, the design can be adapted and recommendations for the design can be given.

What is the impact of your thesis?

Well, what we see is that plenty of infrastructure is being executed within the marine environment. There are many different parties and organisations that would possibly focus on adding value to the environment, but don’t have the knowledge on how to execute this.

Besides this, there are different stakeholders that don’t have specific experience in this field. By using the method that I have created, we give some sort of guideline to create a positive influence for nature, and in this case on coral. In the future, we can expand this method into different ecosystems, such as mangroves and seagrass.

The impact that we can have by implementing could be really large. Many companies don’t have the capabilities yet to implement the method, but if we start following the created plan, It could result in saving our environment, by creating positive effects around marine infrastructure, instead of negative impacts.

What are your future plans and the future plans of your results?

I would really love to continue with this research by putting my knowledge into practice. What we see is that many companies are not yet at the stage of implementation. This makes it a little harder. However, I see a knowledge gap in which I hopefully will contribute to in the future. There are some companies that I am interested in to work for, like Van Oord, that have the focus on sustainability and innovation preferably in the marine infrastructure sector.