Sustainable objectives can only become a reality if there is financing for them. Who actually bears that responsibility? Curious about the answer to the question of who is going to pay for that, interested professionals engaged in a discussion about financing sustainability during a meeting on June 17, 2025.
Roger Mol is chief engineer-director of Sustainability and Living Environment and chief procurement officer at Rijkswaterstaat. He knows better than anyone the added value of the combination of these functions for our living environment. While politics often seems to focus on the short term, Rijkswaterstaat also looks at the long term and the infrastructure of the future. Therefore, Mol advocates rewarding the sustainable performance of leaders and also setting minimal, workable requirements for laggards in the construction chain.
From looking back to looking forward
During the panel discussion, Dick Boddeüs from the National Green Fund explains that banks are generally risk-averse when assessing loan applications. They usually rely on historical data, which is often linked to fossil sources. By evaluating applications based on sustainable objectives instead of economic ones, we can shift from looking back to looking forward.
Robert Koolen works with the construction company Heijmans to create a healthy living environment. Sustainability has now become an integral part of the companys mission; the time when sustainability was only central in the sustainability report is over. Koolen prefers to focus on opportunities rather than risks and would like to see companies rewarded for their performance in sustainability.
Trust is a prerequisite
With the right financial solutions at the intersection of market and government, sustainable innovations can be realized. This is the conviction of Edwin Netjes from KplusV agency. Netjes is an advisor for small and medium-sized enterprises, including start-ups. To achieve fruitful cooperation, trust between public and private parties is, according to him, an important prerequisite.
Maya Sule from Rijkswaterstaat clarifies how comprehensive the greening of structures such as bridges, locks, and tunnels is. Greening encompasses the entire life cycle of buildings, from design and maintenance to demolition and reuse. She expects that the EU Taxonomy , new European regulations for reporting sustainability performance, will have a positive effect on greening.
Re-thinking with ECOpoly
The participants played ECOpoly, a variant of Monopoly. In this game, it is not about achieving the most profit for one party but about profit for society and our living environment. This requires a significant shift in thinking. Participants discuss the financial opportunities and risks involved in greening areas in the Netherlands. And they think together about the best investments for nature and climate.
Carrying capacity of our planet
The afternoon concludes with a clear message from Paul Schenderling. He is an economist and author of There is life after growth, and also founder and program leader of Post-Growth Netherlands. Schenderling talks about the process of looking, choosing, and buying, which we can rearrange to move from quantitative growth to qualitative flourishing.
He offers several actionable perspectives to address this. Setting goals for a time in the future does not work. What does work is establishing budgets to stay within planetary boundaries, such as a CO2 budget and a materials budget. Only in this way can we remain optimistic within the carrying capacity of our planet.
Want to know more?
This meeting took place following the publication of the latest edition of the Lichtkogel, the trend dossier of Rijkswaterstaat. Want to know more? Read the articles in the trend dossier about Financing sustainability .