Programmes
Wageningen Environmental Research offers a combination of practical, innovative and interdisciplinary scientific research across many disciplines related to the green world around us and the sustainable use of our living environment. Our research, carried out together with chair groups, is focused in five comprehensive programmes.
Biodiverse Environment
Biodiversity is the part of nature that is alive! It is every living creature on Earth, great or small, us humans too. Nature is all biodiversity and its interactions with the Earth’s non-living systems, like soil, water, climate, mountains. The countless interactions in nature underpin our planetary health by regulating the climate and the air we breathe, maintaining healthy soils, and providing pollination, food and clean water. We are losing biodiversity at devastating rates – far higher than ever before in Earth’s history. As we lose biodiversity, we lose critical functions that regulate our planetary health. We also lose opportunities for inspiration, education, recreation, as well as part of our sense of place, cultural diversity and spiritual heritage. These are the very things that give us humans meaning beyond mere survival! Humans are causing this loss and humans can fix it, it is not too late to ‘bend the curve’ of biodiversity decline.
Green Climate Solutions
We can no longer ignore the fact that the world's climate is becoming more unpredictable and more extreme. As water levels rise, the risk of flooding looms large. At the same time, periods of drought are becoming longer and more frequent. Yet, our most precious resource – our planet's biosphere – is not only under threat. It is also the source of many of our solutions. In the Green Climate Solutions programme, researchers and academics jointly apply their understanding of nature and natural processes to address the challenges of climate change.
Green Cities
The city of the future is a green city where trees, ponds and parks are the lungs of the boroughs and biodiversity can find its way in. In green cities, people live in healthy neighbourhoods, employees work in circular business parks, and all citizens have access to sustainable food and other natural resources. For us, urban leadership means co-creating these solutions together with cities’ inhabitants. Therefore, we work with urban leaders in business, government and social movements to build green cities worldwide. This can be on the scale of the metropole, migrant settlements, business parks or city centres.
Sustainable Land Use
Sustainable Land Use ensures a fair and balanced distribution of land, water, biodiversity and other environmental resources between the various competing claims, in order to secure human needs now and in the future.
Sustainable Water Management
Water is essential to life and seemingly abundant and well-managed. Yet actually, our changing world is showing us the limitations of these assumptions. Ever more, we are beginning to realise that water, which serves us and our planet in so many ways, is highly underappreciated. That the importance of water, from many different perspectives, is not valued by all. Researchers and academics cooperating in the Sustainable Water Management programme aim to improve the quality of life by optimising water management for a clean, safe and healthy living environment.