Jos Brils: The Voice of Sediment
Interview blog
LandSeaLot is a Horizon Europe funded, four-year project that will apply novel approaches to help achieve the goals of the EU Mission “Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030” and the wider objectives of the EU Green Deal. Leading the charge and the 20-partner consortium is project coordinator Jos Brils, an expert at Deltares in the Netherlands.
For more than twenty years now, Jos has had the pleasure of being engaged with the European Sediment Network (SedNet). Initially, he was the coordinator for the kick-off of SedNet’s first incarnation as an EU project (2002-2004), and has remained active through its evolution to a self-supporting network, engaging sediment professionals from all over Europe and beyond, and providing a Voice for Sediment in many EU environmental policy trajectories including the Water Framework Directive (WFD), Common Implementation Strategy (CIS), Strategic Coordination Group (SCG) and the WFD CIS Working Group Ecological Status (ECOSTAT); Jos helped to initiate and was co-author of the WFD CIS sediment management guidance document in 2022¹. His passion for international networking and for sustainable natural resources management led to his continued involvement, over the past ten years, with the Research Infrastructure (RI) DANUBIUS-RI, a pan-European RI that aims to better understand river-sea systems under the influence of global natural change as well as the effects of human activities.
For our first LandSeaLot blog publication, we asked Jos to step into the Spotlight for a friendly Q&A about the project and his passion for sediment.
LandSeaLot’s tagline, Let’s Observe Together, is a catchy sound bite, but there’s a lot more to it, isn’t there?
Yes. Everything about LandSeaLot is in the name. It’s Land. It’s Sea. The land-sea interface. And ‘lot’ is L.O.T, let’s observe together. So that’s the credo. And together is what is framing this project: bringing together people, bringing together scientific disciplines, bringing together research communities, and bringing together, hopefully, citizen scientists. Because we all need to team up to do a better job in observing the land-sea interface.
In addition to your experience bringing research communities together in projects like LandSeaLot and in your work with DANUBIUS-RI, you are known as the Voice for Sediment, how did that come about?
My biggest passion is sediment. I’ve been focused on it, in my professional career, for 35 years. About 25 years ago, I had the first opportunity to coordinate an EU funded project. Our team came together with representatives from port authorities, river basin commissions, and policymakers to discuss what to do with sediment in the context of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), because in the year 2000, the Water Framework Directive was established with the aim of achieving a good ecological and good chemical status in our waters all over Europe. But when looking at the legal text of the Water Framework Directive, sediment is only mentioned four or five times. And we asked EC DG Environment, ‘how do you intend to achieve these objectives without addressing sediment’? But sediment management is extremely complex, and the timing wasn’t right then to address it. And that is what fueled the momentum to start up SedNet. Since then, we have been advocating for the inclusion of sediment in the European policy context, and WFD River Basin Management Plans in particular². And, yes, I’m now on behalf of this network, the Voice for Sediment in Europe and European, environmental policymaking trajectories.
What is it about sediment that you like? What sparked the relationship?
It’s fascinating. My relationship with sediment started when I was a very small boy. I come from a small village. We had large sand dunes and little pools. And I always liked to play in the water, in the mud. So that was probably the first real contact that I remember having with sediment: it was with mud. Getting muddy.
And the cool thing about sediment is that while it is still considered, in the European policy Waste Directive context, a nuisance, a waste—sediment is an essential element of natural systems. If you take it out, there’s no foundation for habitat. So, it’s not waste! That’s nonsense. Sediment is beaches, it is flood protection, it’s building material, it’s a natural fertilizer, it’s carbon sequestration. It’s an essential element of any river-sea system, and for land-sea interface areas. One of the key societal challenges we address within LandSeaLot is morphology, coastal erosion. For example, to really understand how much of an important element sediment is, in the Netherlands we have to nourish 12 million cubic meters of sand on the beaches annually to keep the coastline there. Without sediment, there would never have been a delta country like the Netherlands. The Netherlands is a sediment country! That’s how important it is.³
So a passion that was born from playing in the mud has evolved to championing the important element of sediment in European environmental management?
Yes, but I’m not only focusing on sediment. Within SedNet, we understand that if you want to do a good job, you must take an integrated approach. You have to manage soil-sediment-water systems, and you have to manage all of it on a full system scale: from the mountains all the way to the sea⁴.
And in LandSeaLot, while we are not going all the way to the mountains (we focus more on the interaction zone), we know it’s important to understand where issues to be managed are coming from. Is it about sediment? Is it about pollution? We need to see what the sources are, and how sediment and associated contamination is transported down-stream by rivers, and how pollution (for example) ends up in the final sinks, i.e. the coastal area and at sea.
And it’s dynamic, it’s complex, and hopefully, in LandSeaLot, by bringing the new tools and connecting to Earth and in situ Observation and in developing distinct advance modeling, and getting everybody to work together, we will get a better grip on where the issues to be managed are and where and how we can best interact. Is it on the source? Is it on the pathway or is it on the receptor site? And that’s in the remit of LandSeaLot.
What is your hope for LandSeaLot in terms of key outcomes?
One of the key outcomes of this project is a jointly designed strategy on how to observe the land-sea interface. And jointly means not only the partners in the project, but designed together with the policymakers, with the funders, with all the stakeholders. So, all the parties see LandSeaLot as their project and that its results, I hope, get adapted, adopted and put it in practice even after the lifetime of our project. In the end, the most important thing is that what we do will be taken up in land-sea interface area policy making and management practice and thus make a lasting impact.
And how do you feel things are going, as LandSeaLot approaches the seventh-month mark?
The expectations are very high. We are engaging with all the important community stakeholders, and they are interested. And so far, so good. We meet a lot of enthusiasm on the stakeholder’s side.
And finally, if your journey truly started from a love of playing in the mud, what would you say to parents who are telling their children to get out it?
Take them out and bewilder them of nature! You never know what particular interest it will spark with them and how it could end up contributing towards advancing science in support of a healthy ecosystem and a brighter future for society.
Read More
1) Integrated Sediment Management guidelines of the WFD here.
2) Brils, J. Including sediment in European River Basin Management Plans: twenty years of work by SedNet. J Soils Sediments 20, 4229–4237 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-020-02782-1
3) Brils, J., de Boer, P., Mulder, J. et al. Reuse of dredged material as a way to tackle societal challenges. J Soils Sediments 14, 1638–1641 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-014-0918-0
4) Jos BrilsLinda Maring; A conceptual model for enabling sustainable management of soil-sediment-water ecosystems in support of European policy. Aquatic Ecosystem Health & Management 1 April 2023; 26 (2): 63–79. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/aehm.026.02.063
For more information on how LandSeaLot will achieve its aims, please visit our website and check out The LandSeaLot Co-Designer Forum and the Common Observation Strategy for the Land-Sea Interface Area here.
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