Thema bijeenkomst Sectorplan Climate Change 14-11-2025 Utrecht

Sectorplan Climate change theme – meeting notes 14-11-2025 Utrecht

Introduction to the Sectorplan and related administration by Roderik van de Wal

Hazards & impacts group

Present: Roderik van de Wal, Mukund Gupta; Wiebke Frey; Bor-Ting Jong; Faezeh Nick; Niels de Winter

Model

• long term data storage and the challenges of keeping this data FAIR (especially interoperable)
• the need for computer technician to support the work (which is in some cases hard as universities have to commit to this support). Maybe technical support could be shared between institutions?
• large scale climate model infrastructure
• CPU time does not seem to be a major bottleneck

Data

• awareness of available data needs to be more widespread
• there is some concern that financial pressures incentivize institutes to move away from “new data gathering” research lines (lab/fieldwork) and focus more and more on model- and data analysis-based research. This could make the Dutch research landscape more dependent on data from elsewhere in the world or make certain unique types of data unavailable.

Lab

• is there overlap across the country? Do we need to make an inventory?
• is a national coordination needed? Sharing of infrastructure between institutes could be a way to save costs and make the research community more efficient.

Education

• National courses at master level?
• do we need more online courses
• is there overlap and does that imply we should prevent that?
• threat of decreasing inflow numbers
• high school – awareness
• connection HBO-Universities

Dutch Landscape of Universities and where do they do what is unclear for foreign ECRs.

The “Tulip Fund” to attract foreign excellent scientists risks drawing funds away from researchers already based in the Netherlands.

Risk & Adaptation group notes

Present: Sara Porchetta; Jing Hu; Wiebke Jäger; Hanna ten Brink; Frances Dunn; Benjamin Campforts

Common research ground

• Energy system effects on climate at different spatial scales
• Microclimatic impacts of mitigation technologies, e.g. offshore wind; floating photovoltaics
• Environmental constraints on energy technologies operation, e.g. planned shutdown of wind turbines due to bird migration (which can be incorporated in energy modelling)
• Risk to species under environmental change
• Risk of compound events and cross-sectoral impacts
• Combining climate adaptation + disaster risk reduction (+ hazards?) expertise
• Coastal risk + adaptation
• Basin-scale sediment transport
• Modelling

Education

• Potential for guest lectures in each other’s courses
• Student lack quantitative skills (entry level v.s. declining number of students)

Potential activities

• Database of who is working on what data
• Lecture series/research exchange to stimulate collaboration between research groups
• Community: Regular meetings (at annual frequency)? A topic presentation per meeting to spark discussion, open invite?
• Next meeting next year tied to (Earth and Environment Sciences NWO) community day