PhD: Impact evaluation of climate policies in agricultural and forest landscapes

Have you ever wondered how we can ensure that climate mitigation and adaptation policies are fair, coherent, and effective? Are you interested in applying state-of-the-art impact evaluation techniques to analyze how climate policies affect land use, GHG emissions, and biodiversity? Do you good communication skills in Spanish? Then this might be your next step!

Climate change mitigation and adaptation in agriculture and forestry represent a “wicked problem”, shaped by uncertainty, conflicting objectives, institutional fragmentation and time pressure. While the EU has set ambitious climate targets for 2030 and climate neutrality by 2050, progress in agriculture and forestry remains insufficient and current policy frameworks have not yet resulted in significant climate mitigation and adaptation results, or generated the systemic transformation needed.

This PhD position is part of the EU-Horizon project “Evidence-based pathways towards fair, coherent and effective climate policies for Europe’s agriculture and forestry (PolicyForClimate)”, which will develop tools and frameworks to enable policymakers and other stakeholders to design fair, coherent, and effective climate mitigation and adaptation policies in the EU. The project will use AI-assisted evidence synthesis, a policy-lab approach, and embedded case studies to offer a continuously updated evidence base on policy impacts, trade-offs, synergies, and spillovers.

Your research will focus on developing, applying, and validating a novel mixed-methods framework for ex-post impact evaluation of climate policies in forestry and agricultural landscapes. By combining state-of-the-art econometric techniques with qualitative participatory approaches, you will empirically analyze how climate policies have affected land use, GHG emissions, and biodiversity metrics. This will require conducting systematic reviews on existing impact evaluation frameworks, run workshops and focus group discussions with various stakeholders, collect, combine, and analyze farm-level primary data and secondary spatially explicit data.

Start date: February 2027.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• Conduct systematic literature reviews and workshops to develop a mixed-methods ex-post impact evaluation framework for climate policies;
• Apply rigorous econometric methods together with qualitative assessments, particularly from policy sciences, to evaluate the impact of specific climate policies on land cover, carbon, and biodiversity metrics;
• Conduct focus group discussions with various stakeholders in the EU to validate the proposed impact evaluation framework and results from the empirical analyses;
• Write research papers and present research findings at international academic conferences;
• Collaborate with our research partners and contribute to the dissemination of project results.

You will work here
You will be based at the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group (FNP) at Wageningen University. The FNP group focuses on the political, socio-economic and cultural dimensions of forests and nature. Our research addresses major challenges including biodiversity conservation, deforestation, forest transitions, climate change and landscape management in both the Global North and Global South. You will be jointly supervised by Dr. Jorge Sellare and Prof. Bas Arts from Wageningen University (WU-FNP), and by Dr. Dario Schulz (EFI) in the research group headed by Sven Wunder.