About NESSC

How hot will the Earth’s climate be in a hundred years? Will temperatures rise steadily or can we expect sudden accelerations?

From 2014 to 2024, NESSC was a virtual research centre that brought together scientists with a background in physics, earth sciences, ecology and mathematics to bring answers to these questions, to better understand the processes behind climate change and to improve future climate projections and predictions.

NESSC comprised experts from the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, Utrecht University, VU University Amsterdam and Wageningen University. Funding was provided by a Gravitation grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, which supports excellent research. The programme received additional funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie, grant agreement No 847504.

Learn in the below video about the main goals of NESSC:

Additionally, NESSC set up a website especially for high school students and their teachers, called Tipping Point Ahead. This website consists of movie clips and interviews with our researchers, who explain what they are looking for in their research, why that is important for science and what they like about their work. We also developed teaching materials to use in the classroom. The idea of the project is to make high school students familiar with our work, and enthuse them for (climate) science.

Research of NESSC is continued within the EMBRACER research programme that started in 2025.

 

Research Institutes: