PhD Position: Nature-Inclusive Dairy Transitions and Biodiversity Recovery

Are you a systems thinker passionate about bending the curve of biodiversity loss in agroecosystems? Are you looking for a meaningful research path with impact on the ground? Are you eager to join a stimulating environment, collaborate across academic fields, and engage with private and public actors? Are you enthusiastic to dive into a plurality of views regarding biodiversity and its recovery? Then, we have a PhD position for you.

Biodiversity recovery is essential to sustain resilient food systems, robust businesses, and healthy societies. A transition to nature-inclusive dairy sector in the Netherlands would be pivotal to biodiversity recovery, because of its influence in shaping landscapes through land use and management, and because of its socio-economic relevance. DECISION is a transdisciplinary project involving farmers, dairy companies, financial and service sectors, and local communities, to co-create and accelerate the transition to a resilient and nature-inclusive future. DECISION will count on a broad group of experts, four fully funded PhDs candidates and one postdoc.

For this position, we are looking for a PhD candidate eager to deal with the understanding of the diverse values of nature (including biodiversity and ecosystem services) across stakeholders, and with anticipating the consequences of adopting nature-inclusive transitions for business and for nature. In that role, you will develop and explore the potential of farm typologies to deal with heterogeneity and tailor a nature-inclusive transition; explore the diverse values of nature among diverse stakeholders; and co-design of scenarios and interventions to support biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• Develop a Research Proposal and a Training and Supervision Plan, to structure the PhD trajectory
• Advancing conceptual thinking by linking farm heterogeneity and typologies, diverse values and valuation of nature, and theory of transitions and transformations
• Conducting and analyzing semi-structured interviews and workshops with stakeholders
• Develop scenario analysis and/or other ‘future’ studies
• Disseminate results by publishing papers in scientific journals, presenting in international conferences, and creating content items dedicated to stakeholders
• Work as a team player, contributing to the activities and wider aims of DECISION project.

You will work here
This PhD position will be situated between the Animal Production Systems (APS) group and the Land Use Planning (LUP) group of Wageningen University & Research. APS focuses on unravelling the complexity of livestock systems, and exploring trade-offs and synergies of innovations regarding environmental impact, animal welfare, and economic viability, to design a more sustainable future. The LUP group aims to improve our understanding of landscapes as social-ecological systems and focuses on interventions that relieve the pressure on scarce space, improving the overall landscape quality.

You will be supervised by Dr Raimon Ripoll-Bosch (APS) and Dr Judith Westerink (LUP). The work of Dr Raimon Ripoll-Bosch focuses on understanding the complex interactions between livestock, nature (biodiversity and ecosystem services) and economy, to design enabling environments for the transitions to nature-inclusive agroecosystems. The work of Dr Judith Westerink focuses on transformative landscape governance, in particular related to biodiversity and dairy farming systems.