Sebastiaan Van Herk

Sebastiaan has >20 years of experience in Green and Digital innovation for Cities. He focuses on mobilising much investment and creating impact on the ground with and for the people. He won the Public Choice award for best EU project in 2021, selected out of thousands from all domains.

He was URBACT Lead Expert in Healthy Cities from 2019 to 2021, helping the partner cities to generate health through planning. The legacy Healthy Cities Generator for which he generated additional funding and international expert support,  is now used by many cities around the world and promoted by UN, EU and other renowned organisations.

His role is often to conceptualise and steer innovation projects and alliances to maximum impact. He enjoys mobilising and facilitating inspiring and impact-driven international collaborations on new sustainability topics.

Since 2002 he has defined, coordinated and delivered innovation, business and policy projects for various national, regional & local governments, multinational companies and SMEs; and research institutes. These include over 50 international projects with well over €200M in innovation funding, that have guided and mobilised a multiple in public and private investments. His current project portfolio comprises: biodiversity, climate adaptation, liveable and healthy cities, sustainable agriculture, circular economy. And in Digital technologies: GovTech, blockchain, and especially Digital for Green.

He is founder of Healthy Cities, having developed a unique tool HealthyCitiesGenerator that helps urban planners and health professionals to promote health through urban planning.

Sebastiaan holds a PhD degree from IHE-Delft & TU Delft in Climate Adaptation & Water Management and an MSc degree (cum laude) in Technology, Policy & Management from TU Delft (2003). He studied Industrial Engineering at the UPC Barcelona & Economics at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam.  

He is founding member of the Flood Resilience Group IHE-Delft (NL). He is guest professor at UPC (ES) and Southeast University (China). He has delivered multiple research projects and over 30 scientific and professional publications.  He has been appointed Advocate for UN-DRR and Expert for UN Environment. He has developed the Global Center on Adaptation as external coordinator since its inception. He  contributes to educational and capacity building programmes. He is an experienced speaker and facilitator of workshops at international conferences.

Languages: English, Spanish, German, Dutch and Catalan fluently and notions of French.

Specialties: Open Innovation, Research & Development, Technology & Business strategy, Policy Development, Project creation and management, Facilitation and collaboration.