项目介绍

2024年9月16日

Function

Are you keen to contribute to a resilient and sustainable future for the Netherlands based on nature-based solutions? Would you like to work in a large team of researchers and stakeholders on the largest landscape transition of the 21st century? Then you could be the ideal PhD candidate to join our team!

Your PhD project will be part of the large knowledge and innovation program NL2120 funded by the National Growth Fund. In this knowledge programme, governments, nature organizations, consultancy and engineering firms, join forces with knowledge institutes and universities. NL2120 is one of the largest partnerships in the world in the field of nature-based solutions. You will be embedded within this knowledge programme together with a large team of PhD researchers that are based at different universities within the Netherlands and will collaborate with many of the partners. 

Currently, land-use and water systems in the Netherlands are disconnected from natural patterns of water availability and soil suitability. As this system is not sustainable and not climate proof, a transformation is required where land use is re-aligned with land suitability and natural processes foster resilience. The recently adopted national policy on ‘water en bodem sturend’ (water and soil guiding in spatial planning) is a first step in the right direction.

Over the past years, nature-based solutions (NBS) are being employed in the Netherlands to restore the natural functioning and potential of landscapes, such as raising water levels in peat areas to prevent soil subsidence and limit greenhouse gas emissions, restoring river segments and create water-retention areas to mitigate droughts and floods. So far, most of these measures are restricted to pilots in relatively small areas. To foster the required transformation, we envisage that such NBS approaches should become mainstream.

As PhD candidate you will investigate how nature-based solutions can be upscaled from the pilot and local level towards a regional level in larger parts of The Netherlands, looking at the biophysical (soil and water) and governance domain. You will investigate how temporal and spatial scales matter for the efficiency and effectiveness of NBS towards providing ecosystem services such as water retention and greenhouse gas emission reduction. Towards this, you will collect and analyse soil and hydrological data, satellite data and  employ additional field measurements. You will analyze governmental policies and ongoing decision-making processes to identify barriers to and opportunities for the adoption and upscaling of NBS in practice.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• developing your own research proposal in close connection to the NL2120 project
• conducting qualitative field research in different regions in the Netherlands to analyse policy barriers to the adoption of NBS in practice;
• analysing soil and hydrological data of the existing climate-buffers to quantify scale dependencies;
• designing governance arrangements that facilitate upscaling of nature-based solutions;
• writing multiple scientific publications and practitioner oriented publications. The scientific publications will be part of a PhD dissertation;
• presenting at and organizing webinars and project conferences for different audiences. 

Function Requirements

You have:

• a completed (or about to be completed) MSc degree in Land and Water Management, Spatial Planning, Climate Studies, Geo-information Science or a related Environmental Sciences;
• a keen interest in biophysical and social-ecological aspects of landscapes such as soil-water interactions, nature-based solutions and climate-adaptive decision making;
• preferably some experience with empirical social science methods, for example: conducting interviews, participatory observations, policy document analysis, qualitative comparative analysis;
• preferably experience with environmental science methods, for example: hydrological data analysis, remote sensing, GIS-analysis, soil-organic-carbon measurements, soil moisture measurements;
• creativity and intrinsic motivation for pursuing a PhD project.

Contactinformation

For more information about this position, please contact Jasper Candel, jasper.candel@wur.nl or Wieke Pot, wieke.pot@wur.nl.

For more information about the procedure, please contact Noorien Abbas, corporate recruiter, by email: recruitment.ssg@wur.nl.