Climate Centre awards nine climate-related projects €190.000 in seed funding

Summary

Investing in sustainable energy technologies is key to reaching climate goals and moving away from fossil fuel reliance. But the current global competition for the raw materials required for this transition, if unchecked, risks reproducing historical unequal colonial core-periphery relations. In this project, we organize an international and transdisciplinary workshop at the UT on the hidden ‘coloniality’ of sustainable energy technologies. The workshop creates a platform to reflect upon the role ‘coloniality‘ should and can play in a geo-techno-social approach for climate solutions. Moreover, the workshop offers the opportunity to kick-off and plan follow-up research activities in the field.

Team members

Andreas Weber, Sandra Calkins, Boelo Schuur, Arjan Dijkstra & Esther Turnhout

Funding amount

Awarded €23.000,-.

Summary

This project seeks to shed light on a dilemma of growing concern in South Asia: the escalating impacts of climate change on water scarcity. Amidst intensifying droughts, farmers resort to extensive irrigation to water crops, progressively depleting groundwater reserves. Alarmingly, current efforts to model and anticipate this dire issue remain limited. We have developed a geo-techno-social approach to bridge data gaps. With an interdisciplinary UT team, we will construct a custom-made geodatabase for India that merges nine separate datasets from the natural and social sciences to better understand the nexus of climate change, water scarcity, groundwater depletion, and agrarian distress.

Team members

Robbin Jan van Duijne, Tanuj Pareek, Diana Reckien, Egor Prikaziuk, Yijian Zeng & Maarten van Aalst

Funding amount

Awarded €24.000,-.

Summary

In this project, we support the transformation of conventional agriculture into climate smart agriculture. We follow a Geo-Techno-Social approach to develop a sustainable water management concept to deal with a changing climate. Together with local stakeholders from the citizen-run farm “Herenboeren Usseler Es” and school kids from Enschede we collect knowledge and data. We further combine satellite, drone and field images with weather, soil moisture and soil fauna data to solve local challenges imposed by dry summers. This study will serve as a pilot for an envisaged long-term collaboration between the Herenboeren farm, local schools and research activities at UT/ITC.

Team members

Florian Ellsäßer, Iris van Duren, Suhyb Salama & Paul Vermunt

Funding amount

Awarded €30.000,-.

Summary

This study examines the potential of immersive virtual reality (VR) to address climate change misinformation. We will compare the effectiveness of VR with social media in correcting misconceptions. VR allows for simulations of future climate scenarios, helping visualize the impacts of rising temperatures and sea level on communities and ecosystems. By manipulating VR and social media interventions we will assess their impact on beliefs, skepticism, and reasoning over a month, while using separate samples from the Netherlands and Turkey. We will also explore the role of human actors and embodiment in VR to combat climate change misinformation.

Team members

Funda Yildirim, Cognition & Elif Erisen

Funding amount

Awarded €15.840,-.

Summary

Circular Economy Platform Twente (CEP Twente) is a collaborative initiative involving academicians and students from the University of Twente. The goal is to make Twente region a model for a climate-crisis-free future via accelerating the transition to a sustainable circular economy through interdisciplinary research, education, and knowledge exchange. The platform will serve as an umbrella association in Twente region, bringing together stakeholders from academia, industry, and government to create a community that shares a common vision on sustainable circular economy. The project includes impact-driven activities like knowledge-sharing events, research collaboration, and technology diffusion workshops for sustainable development.

Team members

Devrim Murat Yazan, Patricia Rogetzer, Letizia Alvino, Marc van den Berg, Daniela Guericke, Canan Acar, Alessio Trivella, Mila Koeva, Mahak Sharma, Marcos Machado, Abhishta Abhishta, Yifei Yu, Efia Boakye Addo, Dan Hartenberg, Amalia Bălan, Tamas Szecsei

Funding amount

Awarded € 8.700,-.

Summary

The project explores participant understanding of urban green spaces through futuring walkshops. Walkshops are guided, semi-guided, and free style senses-based engagements with green infrastructure (GIs) to explore barriers, opportunities, and required resources, to enhance biodiversity and address climate change through informed understanding of GI like green walls and roofs. Participants explore and envision possible prototypes and actions to take along the way, visualized in maps, and brainstorm a potential timeline for solutions. Themes incorporated include local ecological knowledge and how to bridge local community values with scientific discourse. Eco-literacy and urban sense of place can enhance GI for sustainability.

Team members

Sean Vrielink, Alexandria Poole, Corelia Baibarac-Duignan, Eefje Hendriks

Funding amount

Awarded € 12.500,-.

Summary

Geothermal energy is one of the sources that is part of the national heat transition strategy. Recently a new geothermal concept has been developed, Low Unit Costs (LUC) systems. The UT is exploring, together with partners, the possibility of having a LUC pilot on campus. This is interesting from 3 perspectives;

1. Technical and social feasibility,
2. Research opportunities, and
3. Education that the UT can organize around an own geothermal well.

We would like to explore and develop the geo-techno-social components of such a pilot LUC unit on campus in relation to these 3 perspectives with this proposal.

Team members

Mark van der Meijde, Chris Hecker, Mina Shahi, Sikke Jansma

Funding amount

Awarded €30.000,-.

Summary

Climate change drives the emergence of new zoonotic infections in unexpected places, such as tick-borne diseases spreading in the Netherlands. Limited awareness leads to undiagnosed cases, threatening public health and increasing infection rates, and healthcare costs. Physicians consider vector-borne and zoonotic infections when recent cases occur, indicating that timely insight into their occurrence can aid diagnosis. BMS, ITC, and Labmicta have joined up to develop a MedTech innovation for addressing these changes in everyday care. Their objectives include understanding the relationship between climate change and infections, identifying stakeholders, meeting their needs, and building a multidisciplinary consortium for planetary health impact.

Team members

Nienke Beerlage-de Jong, Justine Blanford (hoofdindieners), Nashwan Al Naiemi , Felix Geeraedts , Caroline Kioko , Annelies Riezebos-Brilman, Nils Tjaden

Funding amount

Awarded € 19.000,-.

Summary

Collaborating partner Paebbl aims to repurpose CO₂ into useful building materials, to capture this greenhouse gas permanently and battle global warming. Olivine, one of the most abundant minerals on earth, can thermodynamically capture CO₂ in relevant amounts during its dissolution, but this process is hampered e.g. by the formation of a silica passivation layer. The ISOLATION project aims to design a next-generation microreactor that combines know-how from the BIOS and ITC-AES groups on in operando infrared spectroscopy with our microreactor technology developed for olivine carbonation to elucidate as of yet understudied reaction kinetics under high-pressure and high-temperature conditions.

Team members

Mathieu Odijk, Loes Kleinsmit, Pol Knops, Arjan Dijkstra

Funding amount

Awarded €27.000,-.