Floor van der Hilst is full professor Sustainable Land use and she is the chair of the section Energy & Resources of the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. Her research focusses on the challenge of  how we can achieve sustainable land use and management in the face of intensifying and often competing demands.

She is particularly interested in the potential synergies and trade-offs between sustainability objectives. To address the complexity of sustainable land use, she adopts an integrated and interdisciplinary approach. Her research analyses the entire land system, the complex and diverse drivers of land-use change and their interrelated environmental and socio-economic impacts, linking local and global scales. She employs quantitative spatiotemporal modelling at different geographical scales, combining scenario-based approaches with optimization techniques. Van der Hilst aims to generate actionable insights by focusing on policy-relevant levels, connecting global trends to local realities, and engaging local stakeholders to inform sustainable and context-sensitive land-use strategies.

Prof. dr. van der Hilst is a Lead Author for the Seventh Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Chair of Task 45 of the International Energy Agency (IEA) Bioenergy on the sustainability of the bioeconomy.