Josefina Rodriguez Zuloaga

I am currently working on a challenge-based project focused on the Netherlands’ protein transition and its potential impacts beyond national borders.

The project examines how changes in Dutch consumption of pork and plant-based proteins may affect countries that supply these products, particularly through impacts on land use, environmental pressure, and livelihoods in exporting regions. While the protein transition is designed to support sustainability goals within the Netherlands, the project explores whether such policies may also shift social and environmental burdens elsewhere through global trade. 

The project is carried out in collaboration with a real-world stakeholder and addresses a complex policy challenge with limited predefined solutions. Although stakeholders are not directly involved in every research step, they provide the problem context while allowing space to shape the analysis independently. At first, the scale and complexity of the issue felt overwhelming, as it involves multiple countries, actors, and competing interests. However, the course offers tools to approach this complexity in a structured way, particularly through systems thinking and stakeholder analysis. The project aims to contribute insights that can help policymakers better account for international impacts when designing sustainable food and climate policies. 

Mijke Taal

I am doing a project at the RIVM where we will study the effects of climate change on dietary change. Specifically, our current research questions are: How are yields of staple crops in the Dutch diet affected by climate change in major production regions? How sustainable is the continued production of these crops at their status quo? And what potential actions could be taken to address these issues of vulnerability and sustainability?  

These questions still need to be narrowed down, but the focus will be on determining the vulnerabilities of the crops due to mechanisms of climate change. The challenge-based project gives us the opportunity to work with real problems and stakeholders. The stakeholders are not deeply involved, which I personally like. They give us the problem, and we get the (creative) freedom to formulate our project to their problem. At the beginning it felt a bit overwhelming as the problems that the stakeholders bring are very complex, however I feel like this course guides us and gives us the tools to approach these kinds of problems, which is very useful. Next month we will start producing the results after which we will present them in a stakeholder forum. I'm curious to see what we will find out!