Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM)

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.

Being the oldest environmental research institute in The Netherlands (est. 1971), IVM is currently one of the world's leading institutes in sustainability science. With 100 employees (staff, PhDs and Postdocs), IVM has been rated with the highest scores on scientific excellence, and each year we receive over 140 MSc students and we host over 50 PhD students in our teaching programmes.

The institute’s strategy and policies are set by a management team that consists of the IVM director, an Institute Manager, four Heads of Department, and four Deputy Department Heads.

In this short video, Pieter van Beukering and two of his colleagues Marleen de Ruiter and Xiaoran Li will introduce you to IVM.

Research domains

IVM is organised into four groups of researchers: The Water and Climate Risk department studying the interaction between society and the hydrological and climate systems. The Environmental Geography department studying the geographic variation of human‐environment systems. The Environmental Economics department studying the economics of various environmental themes, and the Environmental Policy Analysis department studying governance for sustainability, focusing on the institutional and political aspects of environmental change.

Read more about our research domains

Education programmes

IVM is the oldest environmental research institute in the Netherlands (est. 1971) and is one of the world’s leading institutes in sustainability science. With the aim of contributing to sustainable development and raising awareness of current environmental changes, IVM offers a variety of high-level graduate programmes in the field of environmental sciences, integrating physical, social, economic and governance systems through its interdisciplinary research and teaching.

View our education programmes