Viewing water as the engine of all life on earth
Our Approach
Why
The world we know today is facing severely degrading ecosystems. Earth suffers from declining trends in productivity, and species are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate. With the current climate change crisis trajectory, the livelihoods of millions of people are seriously threatened.
Viewing water as the engine of all life on earth, we restore water cycles as the key to achieve overall biosphere restoration in order to create a healthy planet.
The Weather making Approach for restoring the water cycle
We developed the Weather Making Approach, which is an agile, impact driven ecosystem planning, engineering and management strategy that can be implemented on multiple scales and with different stakeholder groups.
It provides understanding how to regenerate ecosystems as a basis for restoring water cycles.
The Weather Making approach (re)values the role of the biosphere in weather and climate and develops long-term nature-based strategies for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and translates them into targets and reward systems. It creates an umbrella for a multitude of challenges for society (water security, biodiversity, climate and food security).
We use it to build our services, develop our solutions and determine our research.
Services
The services we offer form the powerful combination of our engineering, ecology, analytics and software.
Within projects, we enable the quantification of ecological values, so that they can be combined with financial, social and economic values.
With pleasure we assist you to identify opportunities, gain insights, and optimize values.
You can come to us for:
Initiatives
Bardawil & Sinai Initiative
We started our journey with the plan to restore the water cycle of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
Discovering the potential of regreening the Sinai Peninsula: a greener and cooler Sinai can bring more moisture to the region, and can positively influence the larger weather systems that cause extreme weather around the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.
Restoring the water cycle in this area will have a big impact on earth in rebalancing our climate, reverse diversification of the Mediterranean, provide water and food security to the local people and improve livelihood and prosperity of people.
Our approach is not only applicable to the Sinai Peninsula. We can use it worldwide.
Perspective paper
In light of our close collaboration with academics and our vision to continue to do so in the future, we have produced a report that introduces the scientific concepts upon which the Sinai & Bardawil Initiative lays its foundations. Our intention with this paper is to communicate our vision, shed light on the critical unknowns in the field of climate science and biosphere restoration and make a call for more transdisciplinary research.
Henriëttewaard Initiative
The Henriëttewaard is both a central waterways hub and ecological hub located at the area where the river Dieze floats into the Meuse. The Henriëttewaard is essential for the drainage of the area and besides that also a potential hub for further ecological development in the area.
The municipality of ‘s-Hertogenbosch wants to redevelop the polder into a river nature park as part of the Green Delta Program.
The central guiding principle of the Henriëttewaard nature park is the transformation of the current agricultural land use into a functional and dynamic natural landscape. The Weather Makers are forming a consortium with several stakeholders and take the lead in determining the added values of the area in terms of water safety, water quality, carbon sequestration and to setup a financial model for the development. The design supports the different cycles by introducing key ecological processes through landscape diversity and biodiversity.
About
About Us
The Weather Makers is an engineering company with a holistic vision. We aim to restore water cycles, achieve overall biosphere restoration and create a healthy planet. We do this by designing and implementing innovative restoration projects.
We believe that, as humanity, we already possess all the tools required to mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change. It is those tools we, as a company, employ to accelerate large scale ecosystem regeneration.
The company was founded in 2017 and named after the book “The Weather Makers” by Professor Tim Flannery.
Viewing water as the engine of all life on earth
The Team
Viewing water as the engine of all life on earth
Angel Imaz
Ambassador
Anneleen Geurts
Earth Scientist
Prof. Charling Tao
Cosmological scientist
Daniel Halsey
Permaculture Specialist
Duke ten Velden
Ecological Engineer
Eduardo Vias Torres
Ecological Engineer
Farah Shishani
Project manager
Gabriel Bellido Perez
Ambassador
Gijs Bosman
Technical Director / Founder
John D. Liu
Ecologist & Filmmaker
Prof. John Todd
Ecological Scientist
Maarten Lanters
Hydraulic Engineer
Maddie Akkermans
CEO / Founder
Maged El Said
Founder Habiba
Prof. Millán Millán † Meteorologist
Pepijn Noordhuizen
Draftsman
Pieter van Hout
Project Manager
Rick van Bentem
Coastal Engineer
Robin Heukels
Digital Advisor/Architect
Ties van der Hoeven
Creative Director / Founder
CO2 Ladder
Sustainability is the most important core value of The Weather Makers. The Weather Makers’ mission is to regenerate ecosystems on a large scale and balance water cycles. In these projects, CO2 absorption by nature is one of the main goals.
The Weather Makers participates in the CO2 ladder to reduce its own emissions. This is a challenging approach in advance, as the company already has a very low CO2 footprint.
Climate awareness in the company is high, given the mission that the company pursues. For this reason, colleagues have already adjusted their behavior. Whenever possible, employees always take the train and travel as little as possible by (petrol) car or plane. This is only done when it is really necessary. For example, several times a year it is crucial to physically meet partners in the Middle East if The Weather Makers wants to be successful in greening desertified areas there. In the long term, this investment in CO2 emissions will be compensated several times by the results of ecosystem regeneration.
Our pursuit
We aim to emit 14% less CO2 in 2024, compared to our reference year 2023. This involves 6% less CO2 in gas consumption (scope 1), 8% less CO2 in electricity consumption and business travel (scope 2). More information about our carbon footprint, measures and our goals can be found in the documentation below.
What is the CO2 Performance Ladder?
The CO2 Performance Ladder is the sustainability instrument of the Climate-Friendly Procurement & Entrepreneurship Foundation (SKAO). SKAO helps companies and governments reduce their carbon footprint.
Documents
For more information about The Weather Makers and our ambitions to reduce our carbon footprint, please consult the following documentation (in Dutch):
-
- CO2 ladder reference year 2023 report
- CO2 ladder report Q1 and Q2 2024
- Information about the SKAO on their website
- The Weather Makers is part of the sector initiative DMI-ecosystem (Dutch Metropolitan Innovations), founded by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Waterways and the National Growth Fund. The initiative brings over 100 parties, knowledge institutes and governmental bodies together. The DMI-ecosystem, as a sector initiative, focusses on reducing CO2 emissions in metropolitan areas, while also reducing nitrogen emissions and increase water management.
- The Weather Makers has joined the sector initiative Netherlands Water Partnership, founded in 1997 by the Dutch government and the Dutch organisations working in the water sector, NWP fosters collaboration in the water sector and aims to provide international initiatives world wide with Dutch knowledge on sustainable water management. CO2 reduction is always part of these initiatives.