Dear reader,

These are indeed challenging times for higher education and university research in the Netherlands. Despite strong opposition from the Senate, NGOs, industry, and universities, the government is planning to implement significant additional budget cuts, including the unfortunate discontinuation of starting grants for early-career researchers. But we are still hopeful that oppositional forces, including this week's impressive demonstration in The Hague, will be successful in turning things around.

The previous government was more supportive of university research, and some months ago the good news reached us that our bid for an NWO Summit Grant has been successful! Starting in 2025, this 10-year grant will enable us to launch EMBRACER—the Earth systeM feedBack ReseArch CEntRe—which will unite climate scientists from Utrecht University, the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), VU Amsterdam, Radboud University Nijmegen, and Wageningen University & Research. EMBRACER aims to bridge the gap between well-understood short-term and lesser-known long-term climate feedbacks, building on insights from paleoclimate records.

At Utrecht, the Faculty of Geosciences leads the program, with major contributions from the Faculty of Science, particularly IMAU. In 2025, eight PhD students will begin their journey with EMBRACER at IMAU. The initiative also has an exciting outreach program, led by the Freudenthal Institute, expanding on the success of the NESSC project (TippingPointAhead.nl). Additionally, EMBRACER researchers will have opportunities to participate in fieldwork in High Mountain Asia, the Amazon, and Greenland. A website will be available soon, but in the meantime, feel free to contact us for more details.

We are excited to embark on this new venture and hope you share our enthusiasm.

For now, we hope you enjoy reading this edition of the IMAU newsletter!

Michiel van den Broeke

IMAU newsletter November 2024