Postdoc Land Use and Climate Change

The Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) of the VU offers one fully funded postdoc position of 24 months in the field of climate change mitigation and adaptation through land use. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to develop a land use model to study mitigation and adaptation in the agriculture, forestry and other land use sectors in two case studies in Germany and Spain. In particular, the postdoc will study how these two regions can contribute to mitigating climate change and adapting to more frequent droughts, heat stress and flooding by modifying their cropland and forest systems.

The postdoc will work in the international KNOWING project (https://knowing-climate.eu/), funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe framework with 16 other institutes. The KNOWING project aims to develop a modelling framework to help understand and quantify the interactions between impacts and risks of climate change, mitigation pathways and adaptation strategies across different sectors (agriculture, forestry, urban, energy, transport). The framework will focus on three main climate impact: 1) Heat waves & health, (2) Soil, forest and agriculture (which this postdoc will focus on) and (3) Flooding & infrastructure (including river and coastal flooding).

The postdoc candidate will work closely with another postdoc and with two staff members from the Environmental Geography and Water and Climate Risk sections of the Institute. Different models will be adapted and developed for different climate impact contexts, and the postdoc is expected to collaborate with other project partners to link the results from the land use model with other models.