The Western Mediterranean is a key region to understand human dispersal events within and out of the African continent as well as for the eventual replacement of Neanderthals by anatomically modern humans during the Pleistocene. Central to any conclusive interpretation of archaeological and palaeoclimatic…

Nucleoid associated proteins maintain the architecture of the bacterial chromosome and regulate gene expression, hinting that their role as transcription factors may involve local three-dimensional chromosome re-modelling.

The world abounds with different footprints that calculate human impact on the environment. Environmental specialist Kai Fang is the first person to have developed a family of footprints that allow better measurement of environmental damage and the depletion of natural sources. PhD defence on 24 Nov…

The energy transition is already a huge challenge for society, but sustainable use of resources is even more complicated. Yet it is at least as urgent. Ester van der Voet has been working on it for decades, for example within the United Nations. Since February, she is a professor at the Centre for Environmental…

Recent publications

Recently, Ingrid Leijten’s book Core Socio-Economic Rights and the European Court of Human Rights was published with Cambridge University Press. The monograph was published in the series Cambridge Studies in European Law and Policy (edited by Laurence Gormley and Jo Shaw) and deals with the protection…

Wrenching poverty, global inequality, violent political and ethnic strife, deadlocked, unresponsive or even collapsing governments, growing dissatisfaction with democracy and missed opportunities for innovation – these are merely some of the challenges of governance and development with which our programme…

How does economic downturn affect pre-existing democratic values and intergroup attitudes? Does economic downturn lead people to lose support for democracy and does it raise perceptions of intergroup threat? Is the potential effect of economic downturn on these political attitudes conditional upon earlier…

Dutch online news platform Mr. Online interviewed external PhD student Sjoerd Lopik about the development of environmental criminal law in the Netherlands and about his experiences combining his job as a researcher with his work in the legal practice.

Integrating life cycle assessment (LCA) with life cycle costing (LCC) offers the opportunity to simultaneously analyze the environmental and economic aspects of product alternatives, for the integration of which a unified computational has been proposed by Heijungs et al. (2013) [1]. The project aims…

Citizens’s attitudes towards trade are not only about the (perceived) economic effect. Commerce also has a variety of security implications. Employing an original experiment, political scientists Matthew DiGiuseppe (Leiden University) and Katja Kleinberg (Binghamton University) demonstrate that security…

The power of personalized nutrition lies in being able to conduct clinical research on healthy people while capturing metabolic markers sensitive to the impact of environmental and metabolic stressors (e.g. diet, changing sex hormones and the menstrual cycle).

The project falls in the context of the EU Thematic Strategy on the Sustainable Use of Natural Resources (COM(2005)670). The Institute for Environment and Resources (IES) of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) has developed three sets of decoupling indicators. Such indicators require the definition of a…

In this article, Tokdemir & Klein examine the strategic actions of governments against domestic terrorist groups and domestic terrorist groups’ reactions to such actions.

Today’s socio-economic challenges aren’t new. In the centuries after the retreat of the Roman state people with different backgrounds and with different ways of life somehow managed to build and maintain a complex economic system in northern Gaul that would produce the ruling dynasties of Europe. By…

How have human-environmental entanglements changed in the Gulf of San Miguel, Darien, Panama, from the first traces human practices through to the present?

TruLife applies lessons from the study of long-term urban traditions, exemplified by pre-Columbian Maya tropical cities, to present-day sustainable urban design.

How can we best deal with the current problems caused by the human impact on the nitrogen cycle? How do we make the transition to a sustainable society? As of 1 September, nitrogen expert Jan Willem Erisman will be working on these questions at Leiden University: he will exchange the Louis Bolk Institute…

What is the environmental impact, the human health impact and the life cycle and production costs of the lab, pilot and commercial diffusion of nanowires and nanowire-based photovoltaic technologies?

The project Deconstructing Stability aims to improve reconstructions of late prehistoric landscapes and predictive models for the purpose of archaeological heritage management.

The Liveable Planet programme assists scientists and local communities in taking up a collective responsibility to develop in a sustainable way. This is done together with a lot of scientist from various disciplines.

The aim is to develop methods to assess environmental and occupational exposure to (individual) pesticides, to be applied in epidemiological studies investigating pesticide exposure and human health. Furthermore, we aim to investigate the potential association between exposure to pesticides and Parkinson’s…

This study focuses on the local level impacts of a highly globalised industry: the international trade in tropical timber.

Which metabolites of sponge are influenced by individual environmental or biological factors?

This project investigates the effects of the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953) on the production, distribution, preparation and consumption of food in transwar Japan and Korea.

Egbert Jongen is appointed Professor of Economics and Socio-Economic Policy at Leiden University from 1 November 2023. His expertise is in the field of socio-economic policy, inequality, and the labour market.

European dependence on Russian gas, earthquake damage in Groningen and the changing climate: the call for an energy transition is getting louder. This transition will be accompanied by an increasing demand for 'new' raw materials. The Geo-Resources for the Future minor looks at exactly that developm…

CML’s education programme aims at training (under)graduate and graduate students for integrated and multidisciplinary sustainability research and for better decision making in managing the world’s natural resources, environmental quality and biodiversity.

The research within the Food research programme at CML focuses on a transition towards sustainable food production and consumption systems. We investigate from a very small to a very large scale, at a local, national or international level. We do so by researching for example molecular tools, food systems,…

The following guide relays information on digital footprints, small steps you can take to improve yours and further reading and resources.

The energy transition ranks high on the European policy agenda, but what does it take to get there? René Kleijn researches how we can extract, use and reuse raw materials in a responsible way. Since 1 March, he has been appointed professor of Resilient resource supply.

In 2016, CML published over 90 papers, successfully crowdfunded the Living Lab project, celebrated a royal honour for associate professor Hans de Iongh and contributed to the Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas. CML awarded five PhDs and taught students from all over the world how to contribute to sustainability.…

In 2015, CML published over 70 papers, contributed to the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris, won awards and advised the Dutch government on the safe use of pesticides. CML awarded 11 PhDs and taught students from all over the world how to contribute to sustainability. We wish you…

In 2017, In 2017 we published over 70 papers, appointed two new professors, researched microplastic contamination in European beach sediment and modelled future energy demand. We awarded six PhDs and taught students from all over the world how to contribute to sustainability. We wish you a pleasant…

How can prospective LCA be streamlined in a way that its practical application in research and technology development increases?

Leiden-Yale collaboration uncovers a tale of samurai same-sex love in a library manuscript.

Promotores: G. Persoon, R. Schefold

Mining for natural resources harms the environment. But we desperately need them, for both the development of countries and the transition to a sustainable energy system. Professor of Sustainable Resource Use Ester van der Voet researches how we can reduce the environmental impact of natural resources…

A retrospective impact assessment of human and environmental resource usage in Late Bronze Age Mycenaean Monumental Architecture, Greece

On Sustainable Tuesday, two weeks before Dutch Budget Day, the Dutch cabinet receives a suitcase full of sustainable ideas and initiatives. The initiators' aim: to make the government plans for the upcoming year a little more sustainable. At the Leiden Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), assistant…