Between 1990 and 2013 Bert de Vries has been a senior scientist at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL, formerly MNP and RIVM). He has been a member of the TARGETS- and IMAGE-teams on Global Change Integrated Assessment Models (IAM) and has contributed to modelling and scenario construction for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for which he was awarded with many colleagues the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. 

Between 2003 and 2013 he was Professor of Global Change and Energy at Utrecht University. His research expertise and publications are in resource and energy analysis, modelling and policy; climate and global change modelling; and complex systems modelling for sustainable development. As member of the Sustainable Finance Lab he is engaged in research on the relationship between sustainability and the financial system.

He has co-edited several books, including Perspectives on Global Change: The TARGETS Approach (1997, Cambridge University Press) and Mappae Mundi: Humans and their Habitats in a Long-Term Socio-Ecological Perspective (2002, Amsterdam University Press). In december 2012, he published the textbook Sustainability Science, based on ten years of teaching and coordinating the course Sustainable Development - An Integrated Perspective. In 2023 a new, second edition of the textbook Sustainabilty Science has been published. Its content, chapter summaries and supporting  blogs can be accessed at www.sustainabilityscience.eu.