Researcher in land use and global change modeling with the IMAGE team at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. Sofie te Wierik’s research concerns green water, held in soil and vegetation, and atmospheric water, and how both can be governed alongside the rivers and aquifers that conventional water governance covers.
Contribution
Te Wierik studied earth sciences in the Future Planet Studies program at the University of Amsterdam and took an MSc in international land and water management at Wageningen University, with thesis research on sustainable land management on degrading land in South Africa. She defended her PhD at the University of Amsterdam in April 2024 with the thesis Green and Atmospheric Water: An interdisciplinary perspective on governance for the Anthropocene, supervised by Joyeeta Gupta. She has since held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and works at PBL.
Her 2021 scoping review in Water Resources Research found that some regions are more exposed than others to the effects of land-use change on moisture recycling, that those effects reach both local and distant hydrology, and that most studies concern the global scale or tropical rainforests, with little work on temperate regions and drylands. The research brief on Bioprecipitation cites the review for moisture recycling in tropical and continental-interior regions. Its finding on the dryland gap supports the brief’s caution about applying those results to the winter-rainfall Cape.
Selected works
- te Wierik, S.A., Gupta, J., Cammeraat, E.L.H. & Artzy-Randrup, Y.A. (2020). “The need for green and atmospheric water governance.” WIREs Water.
- te Wierik, S.A., Cammeraat, E.L.H., Gupta, J. & Artzy-Randrup, Y.A. (2021). “Reviewing the impact of land use and land-use change on moisture recycling and precipitation patterns.” Water Resources Research, 57(7), e2020WR029234.
- te Wierik, S.A. (2024). Green and Atmospheric Water: An interdisciplinary perspective on governance for the Anthropocene. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam.
Related pages
Sources
- Staff profile, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
- PhD defence notice, University of Amsterdam (2024)
- te Wierik et al. (2021), UvA-DARE record
Provenance
Written 23 October 2026 from the people named on Bioprecipitation, using public institutional profiles and published work. Public roles and publications only.