dr. JEM (Judith) Klostermann

I started my career as a biologist providing environmental policy advice at TNO. To learn more about the human aspects I did a PhD which resulted in a dissertation on social construction of sustainability. Since 2003, I am working in Wageningen as a hybrid scientist, using knowledge from public administration and social science in the domains of climate change, water, nature and agriculture. I try to build bridges between tnatural scientists and people without a technical background. 

Some examples of the kind of projects I do:

Involving users in the quality assurance project of the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS): The CDS aims to serve everyone in Europe and elsewhere with climate information. Large datasets are available as well as software tools to analyse the data for the user’s own specific purposes. The CDS is developed by climate scientists and software specialists, and is not usable yet for less specialized users. By involving different types of users we provide advice how the CDS can develop to expand its user base.

Communities of practice in municipalities to discuss the results of the URBANFLUXES project: In this project micro-meteorology approaches were applied to find out how much heat humans add to the urban heat island, for example, with badly insulated housing. In the end it was not possible to calculate the anthropogenic heat because there were too many uncertainties.

Negotiation of uncertainties in the South-Western Delta of the Netherlands: The Delta Works created hard barriers between seawater and freshwater. To help nature, more interaction between salty and freshwater is promoted, but in this discussion, many different views were revealed what ‘salty’ or ‘brackish’ or ‘fresh water’ actually means. These different views partly block progress towards a compromise between stakeholders.

https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/balancing-offshore-wind-energy-…