Research Environmental Economics

How can Nature-based Solutions (NbS) be scaled across wide geographical areas in a fair and just way, to contribute to climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and societal well-being? This project develops a multidimensional framework to ensure social and ecological justice when applying NbS in diverse contexts. With six European action cases in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, France, Hungary, and Spain, FairNature investigates how NbS can be scaled in ways that promote justice and sustainability. The approach combines reflexive learning labs, transdisciplinary methods, and intensive stakeholder engagement to deliver practical solutions. The FairNature Guide will offer tangible tools and policy recommendations to ensure scaling efforts are both fair and effective, ultimately supporting a just transformation. IVM leads this project, which is funded by Biodiversa+.

Contact information: Dr Marije Schaafsma, Dr Ina Lehmann and Dr Alexandra Krendelsberger

Dutch sand landscapes are vulnerable to droughts, floods, pollution and are losing soil carbon and biodiversity. RESHAPE is a NWO-KIC project that aims to 1) develop nature-inspired water system solutions to reactivate landscape resilience and 2) identify effective economic and governance arrangements to achieve this transformation. IVM leads the work package on natural resource economics to quantify trade-offs between ecosystem services, and assessing the incentives required for regional water actors to deal with droughts.

Project website: https://reshape.labs.vu.nl/

Contact information: Zsóka Halászová, Dr Mark Koetse and Dr Marije Schaafsma

Accelerated sea level rise seriously threatens coastal areas globally. Coastal sand nourishments – the addition of sand to increase the beach volume – are potentially a key method to sustainably adapt to accelerated sea-level rise and keep the low-lying hinterland protected. SOURCE develops critically-needed coastal ecosystem knowledge which will allow us to make models that can, for the first time, reliably predict nourishment impacts on key coastal state indicators. The project will determine the ecological impacts, and explore the potential of using nourished sand for new habitat creation. The integrated design process will lead to innovative nourishment strategies, co-created with stakeholders. The project’s Living Lab is a sand nourishment along the Dutch coast, which will be designed, constructed and evaluated.

Contact information: Dr Marije Schaafsma, Dr Peter Robinson and Yudha Pratama

Functional agrobiodiversity (FAB) to support natural pest control in arable crops has a high potential to reduce pesticide use and to enhance biodiversity, without compromising crop yields. Despite this potential, mainstreaming FAB is hindered by among others inadequate economic incentives for farmers for FAB adoption. IVM leads a work package in which we improve natural capital models to quantify costs and benefits of FAB adoption, using scenarios with payments for ecosystem services to farmers.

Contact information: Dr Mark Koetse and Prof. Pieter van Beukering

ARCADIA is a Horizon Europe project consisting of 40+ partners, aiming to enhance the knowledge and implementation of nature-based solutions (NBS) for climate adaptation and optimising (economic) co-benefits. IVM leads a work package on values and perceptions of NBS, of various societal actors and for 8 regions in Europe, creating crucial insights for governance and finance of NBS and stimulating NBS adoption across Europe.

Contact information: Teun Schrieks, Magdalena Lesch, Dr Mark Koetse and Prof. Wouter Botzen

The project "Green adaptation pathways for a resilient future for river basins under increasing extreme floods and droughts" (GreenAdapt2Extremes) focuses on three tributaries (Dora Baltea, Geul, Erft) that are sensitive to floods and droughts. The aim of the project, funded through the European partnership Water4All, is to work with stakeholders in these rivers to devise new ways to deal with floods and droughts, through a participatory approach, analysis of current and future risks, and evaluation of Nature-Based Solutions. IVM leads the work on multi-level governance and valuation of co-benefits of NBS.

Contact information: Dr Marije Schaafsma, Dr Marthe Wens and Shahana Bilalova

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Land use strategies must juggle multiple competing objectives around production, recreation, infrastructure, housing, climate change and biodiversity loss. PLUS Change is a Horizon Europe funded project which aims to develop land use strategies that meet environmental and human well-being objectives, and interventions to achieve these strategies. The project has an interdisciplinary approach, studying land use from political, economic, societal and cultural angles, using a variety of methods including land use modelling, media analysis and behavioral experiments. The objectives of the project will be carried out by over 20 consortium partners and linked to 11 in-depth practice cases across Europe, with a diverse range of stakeholders. The work of the IVM team focuses on understanding historical land use changes, modelling land use scenarios and their impacts, exploring the role of values in people’s land related behaviors and on testing the effectiveness of interventions to change such behaviors. VU also manages and works with the Dutch peri-urban practice case, the Waterland-Zaanstreek area north of Amsterdam.

Project website: https://pluschange.eu/

Contact information: Dr Marije Schaafsma, Dr Hung Nguyen, Dr Nynke Schulp and Ilse Nijensteen

PIISA (Piloting Innovation Insurance Solutions for Adaptation) is a Horizon Europe project that brings together 12 organisations from 5 European countries, and will co-develop climate resilient insurance portfolios, as well as develop solutions for sharing climate-related risk and losses data. The focal sectors benefiting from the project are agriculture, forestry, cities and citizens’ well-being, tackling a host of climate enhanced hazards such as floods, droughts, forest fires, biotic risks, and various types of storms. 

Project website: https://piisa-project.eu/home

Contact information: Dr Peter Robinson, Dr Georges Farina, Prof. Pieter van Beukering and Michiel Ingels

VeenVitaal is a NWA-ORC project, featuring a living lab that includes all relevant regional actors, and investigates which interventions in Dutch peatmeadows are effective to restore biodiversity, halt peat degradation and greenhouse gas emissions, make business operations on peat meadows profitable for farmers and landowners, and provide an inspiring landscape for citizens. IVM leads the work package on alternative business models for farmers.

Project website: https://veenvitaal.info/

Contact information: Jorn van Elden, Dr Mark Koetse, Prof. Pieter van Beukering and Dr Marije Schaafsma

The Spatial non-market VAluation for Biodiversity (SVAB) project aims to develop a novel spatially explicit survey valuation methodology to improve the accuracy of non-market valuation of biodiversity. The methodology is used to assess the non-market values associated with improvements of existing natural areas (e.g. Natura 2000) or creation of new such areas across the Czech Republic.

Project website: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101030693

Contact information: Dr Tomáš Baďura and Dr Marije Schaafsma

CITIES2030 is a H2020 project that studies and supports the developments of sustainable food systems at city and region scale. It does so by initiating or further developing living labs and policy labs in a widely diverse set of European cities and regions. IVM leads WP4 on policy labs, studying and supporting the different ways that policies at city and regional levels may enhance sustainable food systems.

Project website: https://cities2030.eu/

Contact information: Dr Suzanne van Osch and Dr Mark Koetse

The PRORISK Network aims to establish a ground-breaking platform for Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) in the field of advanced Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA). Comprising an interdisciplinary group of 14 PhD students (ESRs), alongside research institutions, enterprises, and partner organizations in Europe and Canada, the network aims to address the pressing need to incorporate ecosystem service valuation in regulatory policy. This approach seeks to halt biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation by encompassing various aspects, from basic laboratory tests to a comprehensive approach integrating mechanistic, ecological, and socio-economic factors. The program uniquely offers integrative and interdisciplinary training in ERA, advocating a shift from traditional toxicity testing to a more holistic, ecosystem services-oriented risk assessment approach. Research objectives encompass quantifying chemical-biological interactions, expanding adverse outcome pathways (AOPs), and proposing a holistic framework linking AOPs and ecosystem services through ecological modelling and socio-economic assessments within case studies.

Project website: https://www.recetox.muni.cz/prorisk

Contact information: Elvia Rufo Jimenez, Prof. Pieter van Beukering and Prof. Roy Brouwer

GRACE is a Horizon EU project that focuses on addressing the needs of rural and small/medium communities in remote regions across the EU to adapt to climatic changes. GRACE is a consortium of 27 organizations from 16 countries, with 5 Demonstrator Regions in Austria, Denmark, Italy, Portugal and Sweden, and 5 Replicator Regions (RRs) in Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Slovakia and Ukraine, aiming to co-develop nature-based approaches for increasing climate change resilience, and to deliver social, environmental and economic benefits. The project will enhance local socio-economic activities, promote circular business models, maximize the value of natural capital, and help mitigate the challenges of depopulation and aging in remote EU regions. IVM leads the work on assessing socio-economic benefits from nature-based solutions in these regions.

Contact information: Dr. Marije Schaafsma and Dr. Mark Koetse

Natural disasters, exacerbated by climate change, pose a growing economic threat. Conventional insurance risk assessments often focus on single hazards and overlook the complex interplay of multi-hazard risks influenced by climate shifts. Additionally, they neglect the role of human adaptation processes in risk reduction. The ERC-funded INSUREADAPT project will develop multi-hazard climate risk assessments for insurance. It employs agent-based models (ABMs) to understand how people make constrained rational adaptation choices, considering social interactions. Through real-time surveys and economic experiments, INSUREADAPT aims to craft innovative insurance arrangements. These arrangements will encourage policyholders to adapt to evolving multi-hazard climate risks by merging financial coverage with tailored strategies, including communication, incentives like deductibles and premium discounts, and nudges.

Contact information: Prof. Wouter Botzen, Dr Peter Robinson and Dr Sanchayan Banerjee

Assessing Climate Change Risk in Europe (ACCREU), aims to advance knowledge regarding climate change risk and adaptation that can be used directly by stakeholder communities. IVM is responsible for the modelling of the impact of the flood insurance market in Europe. In particular we focus on the financial feasibility of insurance under climate change and the effect of insurance on adaptation decisions by both households and small businesses.

Project website: https://www.accreu.eu/

Contact information: Prof. Wouter Botzen, Dr Jan Brusselaers, Dr Max Tesselaar and Michiel Ingels

The Naturance project explores the technical, financial, and operational feasibility and effectiveness of solutions that merge disaster risk financing and investments with nature-based solutions (NbS). IVM’s role in the project is focused on methods for assessing the effectiveness of NbS. First, we focus on reviewing catastrophe models and methods to assess the co-benefits achieved by NbS. We will also improve current methods, both catastrophe models for risk-reduction and stated preference methods for co-benefits valuation, in order provide recommendations that are policy relevant and can enhance mechanisms for financing NbS, both from the public and private sector. To wrap up, we will provide recommendations on integrating NbS into insurance schemes.

Project website: https://www.naturanceproject.eu/

Contact information: Prof. Wouter Botzen, Dr Max Tesselaar and Guillermo García Álvarez

Climate change and rising sea levels and urbanization in low lying areas will increase the risk of coastal floods, erosion and salinization. Adaptation to reduce future environmental risks is inevitable, but it is unclear which coastal areas will be protected and in which regions residents will be forced to migrate. The EU-ERC COASTMOVE project aims to address the challenges these trends pose to adaptation and migration policy. To this end, it will focus on the adaptive and migration behaviour of residents and other agents by further develop the regional DYNAMO model into a coupled global coastal risk and climate adaptation model. For this, we combine an agent-based model (ABM) with a gravity model and a global risk model. The DYNAMO model will be used to develop and evaluate adaptation and migration policies.

Project website: https://coastmove.wordpress.com/

Contact information: Prof. Wouter Botzen, Sem Duijndam, Dr Liselotte Hagedoorn and Moongyeom Kim

To support adaptation to climate change, the use of climate information could play a pivotal role. The I-CISK project is a EU Horizon2020 funded explores how climate information is used, interpreted and acted on, with the ambition to design Climate Services (CS) that follow a human centred, social and behaviourally informed approach; integrating the knowledges, needs and perceptions of climate information. I-CISK will develop tailored CS prototypes with and for stakeholders in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, Hungary, Georgia and Lesotho. The work of the IVM team involves supporting and evaluation the co-creation approach, socio-hydrological modelling of droughts, and assessing behavioural responses to climate service prototypes.

Project website: https://icisk.eu

Contact information: Dr Marije Schaafsma and Lotte Muller

REACHOUT is a research project aiming to enhance user-oriented climate services. All research partners collaborate to create a Triple-A toolkit, supporting seven EU city hubs in analyzing climate hazards, setting resilient urban development ambitions, and implementing adaptation actions. The IVM contributes to REACHOUT through the development of new tools to assess the impacts of climate change on the financial sector and real estate investments in particular. The effects of flooding on losses to real estate and housing prices are analyzed, using both survey data from real-world flood events and modelling techniques.

Project website: https://reachout-cities.eu/

Contact information: Thijs Endendijk and Prof. Wouter Botzen

DISCC-AT is concerned with estimating social vulnerability to climate stressors in Austria, in particular heat and flooding. The aim is to provide Austrian policymakers with more accurate information regarding the societal impacts of these hazards, and how these will develop due to climate change. For example, besides the physical impacts of flooding to the built environment, floods may have more indirect and long-term impacts, which may be particularly severe for low-income households, as they may have less means to recover and adapt to such risks. Therefore, climate risk management may need to pay special attention to such vulnerable societal groups, that may be obscured when only considering impacts to assets. The project applies qualitative methods to explore social vulnerability indicators to extreme heat and flooding, and quantitative techniques to spatially assess vulnerability to these climate risks in Austria.

Project website: http://www.discc.at/

Contact information: Dr Max Tesselaar and Prof. Wouter Botzen

Small islands are particularly vulnerable to climate change because of their fragile ecosystems, small economies, and often extensive, low-lying coastal areas. Therefore, small islands, such as present in the Caribbean Netherlands, are expected to suffer excessively from rising temperatures, changes in precipitation, sea-level rise, coral bleaching, cyclones, droughts and floods. Yet, scientific evidence of these effects in the Caribbean Netherlands is scarce.

In this study, an analysis is conducted assessing the impacts of climate change for the island of Bonaire. A mix of methods is used to estimate the impacts of climate change, including climate and flood models, ecological-economic models, as well as social-science methods such as social media analysis and participatory mapping. Four sub-studies can be distinguished: the estimation of the biophysical impacts, the modelling of economic effects, the identification of socio-cultural effects, and the exploration for potential adaptation options.

Contact information: Prof. Pieter van Beukering

Individuals and citizen collectives often face significant information, coordination, and transaction costs which slows down the energy transition process in residential structures. At the same time, policymakers are expected to coordinate a complicated process that determines the overall effectiveness of the new energy system and the cost of decarbonization. ALIGN4energy aims to address both challenges by (1) mapping citizens’ preferences and investment barriers in a transdisciplinary manner (2) modelling how certain investments will affect the efficiency of the entire energy system; (3) creating adaptive digital decision-support modules for citizens and policymakers that optimize investments at the individual and energy system levels while also providing users with customized information and planning; and (4) co-developing and systematically field- testing participation mechanisms, citizen engagement tactics, and behavioural interventions to encourage investments.

Project website: www.align4energy.nl

Contact information: Dr Sanchayan Banerjee, Dr Julia Blash, Prof. Wouter Botzen, Prof. Pieter van Beukering, Dr Madeline Werthschulte, Floris van Montfoort, MSc, Marjan Nikoloski, MSc, Kevin Goes, MSc and Louison Thépaut, MSc

Energising Development (EnDev) is a donor funded programme that delivers permanent access to modern energy technologies and services. IVM is conducting a real-time evaluation of this programme on the basis of the OECD-DAC criteria, and provides a strategic evaluation of the programme’s contribution to sector transitions in the 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America in which EnDev’s projects take place.

Project website: https://endev.info/

Contact information: Dr Marije Schaafsma and Prof. Pieter van Beukering

Extreme weather and salinisation put pressure on freshwater availability in delta areas. A robust freshwater system is necessary for agriculture, industry, nature, and tourism, thus ensuring a livable delta. Technical solutions have already been successfully tested on a pilot scale, but there are still a number of challenges to implementation, such as a lack of appropriate policy instruments, legal policy frameworks, financial and economic incentives, and an administrative partnership for managing freshwater supply and demand. STURDI-Water aims to achieve integrated freshwater management through a central, regional water bank to match supply and demand, storage and circular water treatment.

For more information, please visit the NWO-project site (in Dutch).

Contact information: Prof. Roy Brouwer and Dr Jan Brusselaers

This project, funded under Horizon Europe, will investigate endocrine-disrupting chemicals as contributors to progression of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease. IVM is responsible for characterising patient profiles, assessing public awareness and willingness to change lifestyles or behavioural patterns leading to this disease, and test different risk communication strategies to instigate behavioural change.

Contact information: Prof. Roy Brouwer and Dr Marije Schaafsma

Cleaning marine Litter by developing and Applying Innovative Methods (CLAIM) is an EU Horizon 2020 project whose remit is to find new ways of tackling pollution in marine areas, with a specific focus on the Mediterranean and the Baltic Seas. 

With millions of tons of plastic litter dumped into marine environments, marine litter increased twenty-fold in the last 50 years, according to CLAIM. Now a widely known environmental issue, plastic litter has been detected worldwide in all major marine habitats, in sizes from microns to meters. 

IVM is leading a work package in CLAIM with a focus on the social and economic implications of the new technologies being developed. This work package involves cost effectiveness analysis, legal and policy frameworks, stakeholder acceptance and public preferences, and novel business models. This research will culminate in an integrated assessment of environmental, social and economic impacts of CLAIM technologies. IVM has a team of four researchers working on CLAIM.

Contact information: Dr Jan Brusselaers, Prof. Roy Brouwer and Prof. Pieter van Beukering.