About Our Organisation
Founded in 1880, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam of today has the mission of taking responsibility for people and the planet by delivering value-driven education, research and knowledge transfer. The basic philosophy of VU Amsterdam is expressed in our three core values—responsible, open and personally engaged—which serve as guidelines for the work and behaviour of our employees and students. These values are inextricably linked to the way in which we give shape to our excellent research and education.
Within the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) was established in 1971, making it the oldest environmental research institute in The Netherlands. IVM is currently one of the world’s leading institutes in sustainability science. With over 100 employees (staff, PhDs and Postdocs), IVM has been rated with the highest scores on scientific excellence, not only due to its scientific output, but regular collaboration with key societal partners such as governments, NGOs, development agencies and international organizations. IVM’s mission is to contribute to sustainable development and to care for the environment through excellent scientific research and teaching. A unique feature of the institute is our capacity to cut through the complexity of natural-societal systems through novel interdisciplinary approaches.
Our Role in KNOWING
We bring to the project: 1) our ability to bridge key disciplines in the domain of sustainability environmental science and climate change; 2) our expertise in the specific problems of impacts of climate change, flood modeling and flood risk, land use modeling.
We lead Work Package 3 (WP3), where we coordinate the implementation of the system dynamics framework that is generated in WP2 for the generation of pathways in the local cases of KNOWING: the Demonstrators and the Followers. In WP3, we also specifically lead the cases that deal with the ‘climate zone shift and agriculture’.
We will also contribute to WP2, which develops the system dynamics framework for KNOWING. Here we lead the work that enables back-casting of mitigation objectives within the framework, and transferability of the framework to wider regions. Lastly, we work within WP1 to structure knowledge about adaptation measures and their interactions with mitigation and climate impacts.
Why KNOWING Matters to Us
KNOWING works at the core of one of the grand challenges of our times: a successful societal transition to climate neutrality. This requires integrated handling of many different scientific disciplines, sectors, models and frameworks. It is a phenomenal challenge that is commensurate with our ambitions, as researchers and as institute, to conduct ground-braking multi-disciplinary research for sustainability. Within KNOWING, we have the change to further expand the scopes of our multi-disciplinarity, working at the interface of yet distant fields, like transport and energy, and to tackle problems that we consider critical, like the integration of models of climate extremes such as floods and heatwaves, and environmental processes such as changes to land use.