The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in Amsterdam. Situated within the VU, the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) is the the oldest environmental research institute in The Netherlands (est. 1971) and is currently one of the world’s leading institutes in sustainability science. IVM’s mission is to contribute to sustainable development and to care for the environment through excellent scientific research and teaching. A unique feature of IVM is the capacity to cut through the complexity of natural-societal systems through novel interdisciplinary approaches, such as using behavioural and experimental methods at the intersection of environmental economics.