WIMEK Research

WIMEK's research is focused on pressing environmental challenges. The research within WIMEK is performed by its participating chair groups, combined in clusters.

The WIMEK Research Programme

WIMEK combines fundamental, strategic, applied and participatory research in environmental, climate and sustainability sciences, both from a social sciences and a natural sciences point of view, focusing on pressing environmental problems and sustainable solutions with local to global significance. Moreover, our fundamental disciplinary research efforts and innovative inter- and transdisciplinary (including stakeholders) research efforts are both needed to contribute to real solutions for the current emerging complex environmental issues. WIMEK especially promotes interdisciplinary research focusing on the interactions between ecological, chemical, physical and socio-economic processes and their interactions with society. This is considered to be essential for a solid contribution towards solving complex environmental problems.

Our research programme strongly concentrates on the components of the cause-effect chain of environmental problems:

  • Environmental contaminants and nutrients, including biotechnological and physico-chemical processes for sustainable use and reuse of water, energy, minerals and materials;
  • Environmental processes and ecosystem dynamics;
  • Global and regional environmental change; and
  • Sustainable development and social change: actors, institutions and governance.

WIMEK's Grand Challenges

WIMEK has identified three major environmental challenges. WIMEK intends to contribute to finding solutions to these challenges by performing scientific research and disseminating its results to relevant stakeholders such as policy makers.

Climate action
Climate action
Managing our future biosphere
Managing our future biosphere
Advancing circular systems
Advancing circular systems

Clusters by which WIMEK researchers are organised

Chairgroups that are partly or entirely supported by graduate school WIMEK are organised by the following clusters:

Climate, Water and Society (CWS)
Climate, Water and Society (CWS)

Landscape Architecture and Spatial Planning (LSP)
Landscape Architecture and Spatial Planning (LSP)

Wageningen Centre of Sustainability Governance (WCSG)
Wageningen Centre of Sustainability Governance (WCSG)
Environmental Technology and Microbiology (ETM)
Environmental Technology and Microbiology (ETM)

Soil Sciences (SSC)
Soil Sciences (SSC)