Research Agenda

The  Deltares Research concentrates primarily on the medium and long terms and it is important for the knowledge base of Deltares and the Netherlands.

The world is facing a number of major challenges, such as adapting to climate change, protecting people against natural disasters, managing scarce natural resources, the energy transition, protecting critical infrastructure, preventing the
erosion of biodiversity loss, and changes in food production. The aim is to embed this in a world that is also climate resilient, protecting the environment and human lives, leaving no one behind and economically prosperous.
In the context of these challenges, a number of international agendas and agreements, as well as European and Dutch policy ambitions, have been drawn up that will guide research and innovation. Deltares has adopted these global, European and Dutch ambitions and missions as the basis for our programming. We have grouped the ambitions and missions in four perspectives that we use to introduce focus to our work. The perspectives we have adopted to view the national and international ambitions and missions on the basis of our water and subsurface philosophy are: Future Deltas, Sustainable Deltas, Safe Deltas and Resilient Infrastructure.

Deltares conducts the research in collaboration with knowledge partners such as governments and research institutes. There is explicit consideration for developments in the market and at private companies, strengthening the research content and making the acquired knowledge more rapidly accessible and usable for others. The results are monitored and, where necessary, changes will be made to the research programme during the period under consideration.

Download the Deltares Mission-driven research Activity plan 2023 which outlines the main lines of the Strategic Research that Deltares will carry out in 2023.