Partnership seeks to compare environmental issues in Florida to those in Holland

 

SARASOTA, FL (April 4, 2008) – USF Sarasota-Manatee’s Institute for Public Policy and Leadership (IPPL) has been invited to be the public policy representative for a unique international environmental partnership project called the Florida-Holland Connection.

 

The Director of IPPL, David Klement, will travel to The Netherlands next week with the 23-member Florida-Holland team for a week-long Water Managers’ Short Course, April 14-18 at the City of Delft, with side trips to The Hague, Rotterdam, Middleburg and other sites. Klement will document the team’s activities as participants share Florida’s challenges in water and growth-related issues and study Holland’s successful projects in coastal protection, agriculture preservation, land use and environmental mitigation.

 

Florida and The Netherlands are thousands of miles apart geographically and are widely divergent in culture, language, traditions and history.

 

Yet they are bound together in ways that many do not realize: low-lying coastlines vulnerable to frequent violent weather events. Encroachment of dense urban growth into low-lying terrain. Increasing demands on fresh-water resources. A desire to preserve agricultural lands. And rising sea levels as global warming melts polar icecaps.

           

Those shared challenges – and the two entities’ differing expertise in confronting them – are the basis for the Florida-Holland Connection. A first-of-its kind alliance, the partnership was created over the past year through the efforts of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, the Dutch Consulate in Miami, the Netherlands Water Partnership, Florida Earth Foundation (FEF) and various state agencies. It began in Holland as a direct result of Hurricane Katrina, when the Dutch sought ways to share Holland’s expertise in coping with the threats posed by wind, ocean and urban development.

 

The partnership is envisioned as a model for promoting international cooperation in addressing environmental issues among nations of the world. It will bring academic, scientific and public policy expertise focusing on three issues: water, growth stewardship and climate change. Florida Earth Foundation’s student exchange program with the UNESCO Institute of Water Education (IHE) located in Delft, Holland, will bring to Florida master’s and doctoral students from developing nations to study the technologies, science and policy developed by the state to deal with its water-related problems.

 

“We expect this project to be used as a model at the United Nations level for how international collaboration works,” said Stan Bronson, executive director of Florida Earth Foundation, West Palm Beach. “Something like this has never before been done in the United States to our knowledge.”

 

Klement, former Editorial Page editor of the Bradenton Herald, said he will work to relate Holland’s experience in dealing with storm surge, growth and water conservation issues to the local level in Florida, much as he did in assessing the impact of Katrina in New Orleans and Mississippi in 2006. That project, a five-part series published in the Herald, projected damage, relief and recovery efforts of a Katrina-like storm on Manatee and Sarasota counties, including lessons learned in the upper Gulf Coast destroyed by the massive 2005 storm. The report was awarded second place in the editorial-writing competition of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association in 2007.

 

“I see this project as an incredible opportunity for USF and Florida to start planning now for what we believe is catastrophic environmental change in the not-so-distant future as global warming accelerates,” Klement said. “The Dutch are decades ahead of us in dealing with violent windstorms – their 1953 storm killed 1,835 people and destroyed almost 500,000 acres of land. They have made tremendous progress since then in protecting their coasts from such storms. Florida with its hurricane exposure has much to learn from the Dutch. And Florida with its experience in wetlands protection and Everglades clean-up can teach them a few things, too.”

 

Klement lauded the foresight of Schroeder-Manatee Ranch, developer of Lakewood Ranch, in underwriting this phase of the project. “SMR realizes the importance of long-range planning for environmental change, just as it does for its own projects,” Klement said.

For more information, call (941) 359-4216.