With a 500-participant, trans-Atlantic crowd and the venue of a science center—reached by a rollicking boat ride across New York Harbor from Manhattan—the H209 Forum, “Water Challenges for Coastal Cities,” struck an aquatic note from the start. The Sept. 9-10 conference at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J., was a joint production of Dutch and New York interests who used the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s historic landfall in New York Harbor to launch a dialogue on mutual concerns about water challenges of all sorts, including increasing demand on water supplies and infrastructure and the prospective effects of climate change on weather patterns, which have potentially dire consequences for densely populated coastal cities.
“The U.S. and the Netherlands face the same challenges,” said Tineke Huizinga, the Dutch vice minister of transport, public works and water management, via video link from the Netherlands. “Water management is a crosscutting issue, and it makes sense for countries that deal with similar issues to share knowledge and best practices,” she said.