Tom Venrooy

My Hydraulic Engineering master thesis at TU Delft was focussed on how to protect our land from the ocean and its powers. The beach and the ocean is where I grew up and I am willing to give my career on this project so that my children could have the same experience.I designed a formula to determine the rock size of a coastal protection structure based on the incoming expected wave forces. During this year I was questioning myself, why is it necessary that we constantly need to adapt our coastal protection systems? When are the dikes high enough to mitigate from all dike-breaking events? The effects of disastrous human interaction forces adapting our land and coastal structures to the rapidly evolving effects of climate change. But instead of demanding more and more from our lands and ocean, isn’t it time to focus on how to restore the planet by figuring out a way how to work WITH the ocean? Learning how to work with the ocean is key to the challenge of building a climate resilient ecosystem. Our project focuses on gathering data and sharing knowledge between ocean farmers, marine biologists, data scientists and engineers. We are developing monitoring equipment for ocean farmers based on end-to-end IoT solutions. That means that we provide the tools to create and maintain climate resilient regenerative ocean farms. Successful kelp cultivation correlates between human impact, climate change and knowledge.The combination of quantification and knowledge is essential for the kelp industry to accelerate and eventually succeed.