The overall purpose of this project is to examine what philosophical hermeneutics can contribute to environmental ethics, and test the usefulness of the hermeneutic perspective in environmental ethics in the evaluation ecological restoration projects. The aim of this project is, first, to investigate whether a hermeneutic approach can help understand the connection between readings and interpretations of the landscape, personal narrative identity ("environmental identity") and environmental ethics, second, to examine whether a hermeneutic explication and articulation of ethical motives in landscape conflicts regarding the human relation to landscapes can help improve moral debates on landscape issues, and third, to inquire if hermeneutics can provide the conceptual building blocks and deliberative tools for an ethical framework that help to evaluate existing landscape practices.

Biological engineers are developing increasingly sophisticated technical measures intended to mitigate environmental, safety and security effects of synthetic biology. Research on methods of intrinsic biocontainment have progressed from simple kill switches to multiple nutrient dependency strategies to reduce fitness and engineered genetic codes to limit horizontal gene transfer. Research to date has focused on lab strains of E.coli rather than commercial chassis as model organisms. Furthermore, containment methods have not been the objects of independent technical testing or of systematic multistakeholder informed risk assessments. The proposed research and utilization plan is designed to fill these gaps in existing work and will pave the way for a systematic risk assessment and, where applicable, risk management of microbes of industrial interest.

Wildlife such as wolf, wisent, and wild boar are returning to the Netherlands on a large scale. This return leads to tensions between people and wildlife and calls for new forms of wildlife management. WildlifeNL will develop new technologies, governance arrangements and communication strategies that influence the behaviour of wildlife ánd people to enable low-conflict human-wildlife coexistence. Moreover, together with all stakeholders, we explore various scenarios for how sustainable human-wildlife coexistence may look like, for example by playing a serious game. In this way WildlifeNL contributes to the search for a nature-inclusive society in which humans and wildlife can flourish.