Overview
Nora Van Cauwenbergh is co-founder and chief executive of BitaGreen, which she started in April 2020 and runs from Brussels. She combines that role with two academic positions: she has been professor of water resources management and governance at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel since October 2017, and associate professor of water and societal transitions at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education since April 2007. Between March 2010 and April 2020 she was the owner of BAOBAB design bvba.
From April 2003 to June 2008 she was a researcher and PhD candidate at the Université catholique de Louvain, where she completed a PhD in environmental sciences and land planning in 2008. She studied at the Universidad de Córdoba in 2000 and 2001, and holds an MSc as bio-engineer in environmental technology and tropical agriculture from KU Leuven, obtained between 1997 and 2002. Her stated areas of expertise are sustainable development, climate and nature tech, nature-based resilience, water security and societal transitions.
Career history
In the news
- November takes us from Barcelona to Helsinki. → Smart City Expo World Congress, Barcelona | 3–5 Nov → Slush, Helsinki | 18–19 Nov Two very different events. One message for both: nature-based climate adaptation only works if the nature keeps working. We treat it as the critical infrastructure it is, from the investment case to the years after. Want to meet? Get in touch with Nora Van Cauwenbergh or Julien Moreau
- Urban trees aren’t hard to value because their benefits are unclear. They’re hard to value because we don’t know enough about how they grow. New research from Ali Eslami (the first publication from his PhD at the Department of Water and Climate, VUB, within the 100KTREEs Project) takes that on directly. The problem it starts from: two cities, two tree inventories, almost nothing in common. Different fields, different levels of detail, different years. Before you can say what a tree will deliver, you need a consistent way to
- This week we’re in Iberia, looking at climate and nature risk from two sides. In Portugal, monitoring tree health and green spaces management at a customer site. And in Salamanca, conversations with investors and partners about how nature-based resilience actually gets financed. Our founder Nora Van Cauwenbergh will be at Startup Olé Accelerator Salamanca, 13–14 October. If you’re working on climate adaptation, urban resilience or financing nature in the region, that’s the conversation we’re there for.
- Nature isn't treated as critical infrastructure, even though it is.’ That's how our founder Nora Van Cauwenbergh put it in her conversation with Benny Debruyne for Trends. Plenty of platforms map flood or heat risk. Far fewer tell you what to do about it. That's the gap we built Bitagreen to close: specific intervention scenarios, from conservative to ambitious, with the costs and benefits laid side by side. Take Leuven, one of our first clients. In the digital twin we built of the city, the mid-range scenario avoids
- The economics of adaptation add up. The rules don't, yet. Our founder Nora Van Cauwenbergh asks why governments found fiscal room for defense but not for climate adaptation, and whether other EU countries should back Spain’s request to change that. Join the discussion in her post. 🌿
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