Funded Projects Gallery

Overview of the Pathways to Sustainability funded and co-funded projects. The Seed grants (up to 10.000 euro) aim to stimulate inter- and trans-disciplinary interactions and create impact. The Incubator Grants (8,000 euro) aim to invest in community building, offering inter- and trans-disciplinary teams of UU scholars the opportunity to collaborate on innovative ideas. More information about the funding opportunities can be found here.

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List of Seed and Incubator projects (2022-2023)

Seed Projects

Incubators

The new Incubators that are awarded in March 2024:

  • Naturicity: Everyday narratives of urban futures

    This Incubator awarded project aims to contribute to new imaginaries of cities, where nature is viewed as an integral part of environmental, social resilience and social justice, with changing perceptions driving its uptake through culture, markets and policies.

  • Future-proof Proteins: Bridging sustainability, health and equity in the protein transition.

    This Incubator funded project aims to promote an open, interdisciplinary exchange on the protein transition, by unravelling the factors which have the biggest potential to hamper the speed of the protein transition.

  • Plastics on your Plate

    This Incubator funded project aims to build an improved understanding of contamination pathways and health impacts of plastics and plastic exposure in humans and farm animals, and explore how diets and food type may affect the exposure to plastics.

  • Sustainable Peatlands NL

    This Incubator funded project aims to accelerate the transition of the Dutch coastal peatlands towards a sustainable future by developing concrete action perspectives and pathways to enhancing the sustainability of peatlands.

  • Compounding Hydroclimatic Extremes

    This Incubator funded project aims to develop a method to capture hydroclimatic compound events in terms of frequency, duration, intensity and spatial extent, and move beyond the current assessment of isolated climate impacts.

Signature Projects

  • Financing Biodiversity

    How can Dutch pension funds use their investments towards a more sustainable future? The Financing Biodiversity project aims to help them pursue nature-positive investments through a theoretical framework, active engagement and innovative strategies.  

  • Tackling gender inequality and sustainability in agribusiness

    The cut flower industry in Colombia is an example of the complex interaction between gender, labour, social and environmental issues. The low-skilled labour is mainly done by female workers. This Signature Project aims to unfold the intricacies of global value chains, hopes to raise awareness from consumers to producers through the power of theatre play. 

  • Whose Ocean?

    The ocean is crucial to life and climate, but its voice is barely heard in law and policy decisions. While the UN explicitly speaks about “our ocean”, it is completely unclear who the “our” refers to. This project will produce a charter and organize an assembly to give the ocean a meaningful voice in international and national discussions, inspired by similar initiatives, bringing together academics, with artists and writers.

  • Conceptualizing Ecocide

    In the current era of unprecedented threats to the environment, the push to make Ecocide an international crime is gaining momentum. This project explores how the concept of Ecocidecan create breakthroughs in biodiversity protection, with a keen eye for indigenous rights. Next to a Knowledge Hub and policy briefs, it aims to use mock trials (simulations of a legal trial using real examples) as experimental and creative test setting.

  • Rethink Hydrogen

    The North Sea is considered a hotspot for production of green hydrogen as it offers ideal conditions, being situated in close proximity to market demand. But currently, researchers, politicians and the wider public have a limited overview of the known and unknown aspects of hydrogen production. This project team proposes to take up the challenge to develop a holistic view on hydrogen production in the North Sea by identifying and quantifying critical relationships, to close knowledge gaps and develop an interface between complex academic knowledge and the societal debate on the future role for green hydrogen.

  • Shared qualities of renewable energy communities

    Renewable energy communities are expected to play an important role in the European energy transition. However, concerns are expressed on how all RECs can maintain a steady level of quality. The research team aims to investigate whether standardisation is an appropriate tool for providing the intended quality, how standardisation should occur, and what minimum requirements should be.

  • Resourcefulness

    The energy transition is causing a steep increase in mining of ‘critical minerals’ such as graphite, lithium, and cobalt, essential for low-carbon technologies. The key question this project aims to answer is: what financial practices can we envisage that would make that finance institutions would contribute to making sure new resource extraction results in a just energy transition? This project will map the flows of critical materials and finances, look into sustainable mining initiatives and investigate financial flows in a journalistic style.

    Photography by Tom Hegen.

Other (Co-)Funded Projects

  • Boosting Biodiversity Community

    This community project aims to strengthen biodiversity globally and locally. This ambition is part of the Utrecht University Strategic Plan. Follow the link to find out how the community aims to make this happen and why is it deemed necessary.

  • The University in a Changing Climate

    What is the future of the university in a post-fossil society? How could the university contribute to transformative change? Post-doc research project by Lisette van Beek.

  • Complexity of Sustainability Fund

    This fund is a joint initiative between The Utrecht Centre for Complex Systems Studies and PtS, which aims to develop a community of researchers who wish to develop state of the art methods to practice co-produced complexity science for a just and sustainable transition through a series of interactive workshops.

  • Universities for Sustainable Futures

    This project led by Dr. Adèle Rae Tufford from the Urban Futures team at the Copernicus Institute, seeks to form a global inventory of innovative institutional formats for sustainability, in order to inspire and inform sustainability transition decision making at Utrecht University and beyond.