Chris Zevenbergen (1958) is professor at the Water Engineering Department of IHE Delft, and professor of Delta Urbanism at TU Delft.
He is also a visiting professor at the Southeast University (SEU) and at the North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power (NCWU). He was a Member of the Board of the Public Private Innovation Platform Clean Tech Delta, The Netherlands in 2013 and 2014 and of the Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP) from 2010 to 2013. He is now chairman of the Academic Board of the MSc program River Delta Development of three Applied Universities in The Netherlands, and project director of DeltaCAP, a Dutch funded program on capacity development to support the implementation of the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100. He 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 20 years international research and consultancy in environmental engineering and water management of urban systems.
In the past 15 years he has accumulated extensive national and international 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 and on decision support tool development in urban planning with practical application in urban flood management and climate adaptation. He has a strong affinity with the ecological, socio-economic, institutional aspects of urban planning and water management. Therefore, he considers himself more a generalist than a specialist.
He has published/edited five books and more than 120 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 chairs the Flood Resilience Group (FRG) of IHE Delft. He participates in various national and international advisory boards of governmental and scientific institutions (e.g. IPCC EM Infra, Rotterdam Climate Proof, Environmental Science Group Wageningen, iBuild, DLR Future Mega Cities, EPSRC, Delta Alliance, Dutch Delta Plan, Room for the River program).
He holds a master’s degree in Ecology and Soil Sciene at the University of Wageningen and a P.h.D. in Environmental chemistry at the Utrecht University.