In the spotlight: Fruitful collaboration with Veiligheidsregio Utrecht; Global Food Security in the media; Governance; An integrated approach to urban and rural energy transition; Projects starting in September 2022.
Fruitful collaboration with Veiligheidsregio Utrecht
The year 2022 is a fruitful year in the collaboration between 4TU.RE and Veiligheidsregio Utrecht (VRU). Earlier this year Britt Lukassen graduated at TU/Eindhoven with supervision of Laura Genga. The research topic was on AI for decision making. Britt used decision mining and process mining to find elegant solutions for certain processes that could not be analysed with decision mining before. The VRU is very much interested in taking the results of this project further.
This fall, Menno Domhof, MSc student Civil Engineering & Management, will graduate on the topic of: “Design of a participatory approach to assess climate-resilience of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug area”.
His supervisor Joanne Vinke-de Kruijf wrote: “Menno developed an approach that allows safety regions to assess and improve resilience in a participatory way. The approach has been tested for a pilot case Henschotermeer, an area that – due to climate change and other developments – is becoming increasingly vulnerable to wildfires. Part of the test was the organization of an interactive workshop in which the VRU and other stakeholders jointly assessed the key functions, vulnerabilities and possible solutions. Menno will defend his thesis on September 23, 2022.
Global Food Security in the media
Research on priorities for global food security under extreme events was published this summer in One Earth. This project entailed an international multidisciplinary collaboration of 69 food system experts, one of them Andy Nelson. Together the experts identified both threats to food security and research gaps. Read more in this press release.
“How food consumption affects land use” is a project that Pim Post (DeSIRE researcher) is working on with Yue Dou (DeSIRE tenure tracker) and Andy Nelson. This lead to a pre-registration of the research protocol published on the Open Science Framework, which is a first pre-registration at ITC, quite an accomplishment!
Thirdly, Aleid Teeuwen (DeSIRE PhD candidate at ITC) working with Yue Dou, Markus Meyer (was a DeSIRE tenure tracker, now a professor at Anhalt University of Applied Sciences) and Andy Nelson worked on simulation models that predict the impact of policy on food security, which also lead to a publication in Nature Food and got a very nice commentary piece in Nature Food about the research as well. Well done!
Governance
Wieke Pot held a key-note speech at the Water & Climate hub at the University of Utrecht at 1 September and was involved in developing and giving a summer course on governance and how to deal with long-term problems (in Dutch). This summer course is aimed at strategists, governors / administrators, policy makers etc. and with that it offers an interesting network of practitioners. There is also a new publication available online: Wieke Pot, Paul ’t Hart en Jorren Scherpenisse on robust governance.
An integrated approach to urban and rural energy transition
Joanne Vinke-de Kruijf finalized an NWO research project in which action perspectives were developed for integrating energy transition, climate adaptation and sustainable agriculture. The final report is about to be finalized and we have a news article with lessons learned (in Dutch).
Projects starting in September 2022
- Zac Taylor, Tina Comes and Wieke Pot start with the RED&BLUE project
- Claudiu Forgaci starts with the Sponge Cities project
- Charissa Champlin starts with the Behavioural Design for Climate Action project