ƒNew projections from IIASA researchers provided a more in-depth view of future population, structured by age, sex, and level of education for 195 countries in the world.

IIASA scientists used the GAINS model to complete a new generation of projections of global future air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions for 168 world regions that indicated the outcomes of potential policy decisions in the future.

Most flood risk reduction projects in multiple global contexts have paid off, according to IIASA scientists who produced a comprehensive cost-benefit review to show the many benefits of decision-support tools in different environments: the Caribbean, Nepal, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, and New York.

Nineteen IIASA scientists and two Council members contributed to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2014.

Modeling the macroeconomic impact of three different education-specific policy/investment scenarios by IIASA researchers revealed the critical importance worldwide of educational attainment, especially secondary education, in determining economic development.

Complex issues of economic cooperation between the enlargedEuropean Union, the Eurasian Customs Union (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia), and its neighbors (including China, Korea, and Japan) were discussed at joint scientific–stakeholder workshops held at IIASA.

IIASA was represented on the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Technical Group on Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All), held at the United Nations, New York, and scientists are taking a leading role in SE4All initiatives worldwide.

Warming in the Arctic is increasingly being influenced by human activities and, as sea ice declines, is itself influencing plans for land use and exploitation. The Arctic Futures Initiative was launched at IIASA in 2014 to address the need for a holistic, integrative assessment of plausible futures that crosscuts national strategies and ensures future sustainable development of all Arctic territory.

In 2014 IIASA made available emission projections for 18 short- and long-lived atmospheric substances to 2050 to provide important input both for national analyses as well as for international model experiments of global circulation climate and chemical transport models. These are being used by the Arctic Council.

The state of energy poverty in three Central American countries—Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua —was assessed for the first time in an analysis conducted by IIASA for the World Bank; policy costs to eradicate energy poverty were estimated using an application of the IIASA MESSAGE-Access model and a policy report was circulated among policymakers and stakeholders in the three countries.

BeWhere Brazil, a techno-economic optimization model that analyzes the alternative uses of sugarcane biomass for second-generation ethanol and/or bio-electricity production in Brazil, was launched in 2014; the model takes into account different technological improvements to existing sugarcane mills.

Although recent advances in gas production technology have led to exploitation of bountiful, low-cost natural gas, particularly in the United States, via hydraulic fracturing, IIASA research showed that without new climate policies, expanding “fracking” will not slow the growth of global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide over the long term.

IIASA analyzed the objective of universal pension coverage in Mexico, one of a series of briefings on social protection in older age.

The IIASA project “Structural Change of the Finnish Economy: A Systems Approach,” which provided policy advice on regional development and inter-bank lending was submitted to the Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy.

An IIASA study was the first to examine adaptation to forest fire danger on a pan-European scale and showed that climate change is likely to bring increased temperatures and longer droughts to Europe, making the continent’s forests more susceptible to fires.

A workshop for European policymakers in Brussels heard from IIASA researchers about the substantial new investment needed in low-carbon energy and energy efficiency over the coming decades and the risks of “locking in” fossil-based energy infrastructure that will likely become redundant before the end of its useful life.

IIASA is working on a European Union project to evaluate and improve integrated assessment models used for developing strategies to deal with long-term EU climate policy in a global context. A main strategy is to increase and enhance data input to the modeling.

A €1.4 million grant from the European Research Council is enabling the extension of IIASA’s Geo-Wiki initiative by building a network of citizen scientists to provide in situ data on land cover and land use in Austria, Kenya, and Tanzania, using mobile apps to enable people in the field to upload land cover data to Geo-Wiki.

IIASA, together with the Stockholm Environment Institute, organized a workshop in Kenya which focused on how the introduction of low-carbon options might change the conditions for expanding energy access in Africa.

IIASA used the GLOBIOM model to study three scenarios from the IPCC’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathways to determine consumption, production, prices, and trade projections for different animal products in sub-Saharan, East, West, and southern Africa and the Congo Basin against selected regions of the world.

Thirty-six young scientists took part in the 2013-2014 Southern African Young Scientists Summer Program at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

Researchers updated key crop eco-physiological parameters in the Agro-ecological Zones (AEZ) model database, for example, the japonica rice parameters for Northeast China, where moderate warming in the last 50 years has enabled innovative adaptation efforts to expand the rice planting area and rice yield increment.

IIASA collaboration with its Indian partner institution in the project, Sustaining and Improving Rural Livelihoods through Adaptive Approaches to Land, Soil Nutrient and Water Management, in 2014 focused on sustaining and improving rural livelihoods in the Gujarat region on the northwest coat of India.

IIASA research showed that while improving household electricity access in India over the last 30 years has contributed only marginally to the nation’s total carbon emissions growth, expanding low-carbon energy technologies in developing countries such as India would bring many co-benefits beyond climate mitigation.

IIASA scientists are working with colleagues from Japan to research ways of improving the representation of technological change in integrated assessment models (IAMs) to inform climate policy choices.

Given the substantial interactions between long-lived greenhouse gases and short-lived climate pollutants, IIASA assessed the industry and transportation sectors across the Asian continent and discovered emission mitigation options that could help reduce multiple polluting substances simultaneously.

IIASA research into bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) using the BeWhere model showed that some of the southern coastal regions of Japan appear suitable for carbon storage. A higher storage potential could be achieved through off-shore carbon storage and enhanced cross-border collaboration by Japan with South Korea.

IIASA scientists organized the formal launch of the cross-sectoral Tropical Futures Initiative (TFI) at a workshop with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding in Jakarta, Indonesia, in February 2014.

IIASA worked with Australian and other international researchers, using the GLOBIOM model and new data inputs to consider multiple aspects of livestock futures in African countries.

Researchers from Australia collaborated in 2014 on a number of internationally significant projects including Future Earth, the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium, and the Global Carbon Project.

Awards

In 2014 the Peccei Award and Mikhalevich Award were presented, respectively, to Danielle Haak from the United States and Jun Liu from China.

The Peccei Award is given to young scientists in recognition of their understanding of global problems, and the Mikhalevich Award to young scientists solving research questions with mathematical tools. The awards provide financial support to return to IIASA for an additional six-month research period.

Peccei Award winner, Danielle Haak, a third-year PhD candidate at the School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, conducted her research within IIASA’s Advanced Systems Analysis (ASA) Program. Her final paper was entitled, “Coupling ecological and social network models to assess ‘transmission’ and ‘contagion’ of an aquatic invasive species.”

Mikhalevich Award winner, Jun Liu, a fourth-year PhD candidate at the College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at Peking University, conducted her research in IIASA’s Mitigation of Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gases (MAG) Program. Her final paper was entitled, “Air quality benefits of coal substitution policies in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region in China.”

Honorable mentions, with grants enabling recipients to return to IIASA for three months’ research, went to: Thomas Schinko, a third-year PhD student from the University of Graz, Austria, who worked in IIASA’s Risk, Policy and Vulnerability (RPV) Program, for “Impacts of risks perceptions on investment costs of renewable energy sources”; and Edoardo Borgomeo, a second-year PhD student at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, who also worked in RPV, for “Modeling vulnerability to drought in water supply systems.”

Scholarships

In 2014 funding was again offered to young scientists through IIASA’s Annual Fund and the Petr Aven Fellowship. An Annual Fund scholarship was awarded to Ms. Thanicha Ruangmas of Thailand, who worked in IIASA’s Mitigation of Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gases (MAG) Program on a project to explore the embedded pollution costs in Chinese exports to the European Union.

Mr. Askhad Panesh of the Russian Federation won the Petr Aven Fellowship for research in IIASA’s Advanced Systems Analysis (ASA) Program on sustainable exploitation of biological resources through maximizing profit while minimizing environmental impacts. More>>

In 2014 there were 11 postdoctoral researchers in-house at IIASA, funded from different sources. Postdoctoral Program research, which is always on a topic related to IIASA’s scientific agenda, is intended to build participants’ experience and expertise, including knowledge of systems analysis.

• Artem Baklanov (ASA, Russia) studied the complex dynamics of players interacting under pressures caused by diversification of their individual interests under global economic and political challenges.
• Gergely Boza (EEP, Hungary) is researching best plant investment strategies, with optimal balance between investment in allelochemical production and growth, in combination with different agricultural techniques.
• Fulvio Di Fulvio (ESM, Italy) modeled and optimized forest fuelwood procurement to analyze forest biomass integration with other wood products and biomass from dedicated energy-wood plantations.
• Daniel Jessie (ASA, United States) began developing different analytical approaches to questions that arise in the analysis of complex systems, in particular, the nature of strategically interacting agents.
• Christina Kaiser (EEP, Austria) studied competitive and synergistic interactions between soil microbes belonging to different microbial functional groups in a spatially structured system.
• Pietro Landi (EEP, Italy) is researching the adaptive behavior of single individuals in two different projects: animal movements and conservation of biodiversity, and sustainable management of fisheries.
• Wei Liu (RPV, China) studied integrated adaptive management of complex socio-ecological systems, with a focus on China, one research topic being a synthesis of giant panda habitat selection.
• Luzma Nava Jimenez (WAT, Mexico) defined a qualitative methodology to evaluate and compare different scenarios of environmental management and governance of transboundary water resources.
• Carl Salk (ESM, USA) used the Geo-Wiki tool to generate better land cover maps at different scales to discover availability of land for different human needs and cooperation in natural resource management among users.
• Per Sjödin (EEP, Sweden) studied the consequences for cooperation of state‑dependent dispersal of individuals and the coexistence and evolutionary branching of species in one- and two-trophic communities.
• Matthias Wildemeersch (ASA/ESM, Belgium) focused on applying probability and control theory to network dynamics and robustness to better understand the behavior of large‑scale, complex networks and improve their stability.

IIASA uses workshops as an important element of outreach, training, and information exchange, for scientists and policymakers. A few of 2014’s many workshops are highlighted here.

• Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) researchers held a technical workshop in Jakarta, Indonesia, to prepare for a quantitative assessment of REDD+ for Indonesia.
• IIASA hosted an expert workshop on behalf of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate looking at how climate mitigation strategies and technologies can change energy access conditions.
• An Arctic Scenarios Workshop in collaboration with the Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme was held at IIASA to develop a pan‑Arctic and regional Arctic scenario framework.
• Researchers from the Risk, Policy and Vulnerability (RPV) Program gave a two-day workshop, “Fiscal and Economic Disaster Risks in Cambodia—Validation and Use of the CatSim Approach,” to 30 national-level Cambodian policymakers and NGOs.
• At the International Energy Workshop, ESM scientists presented the latest update of the BeWhere Alps model which identifies bio-energy potential in the very fragile Alpine ecosystem.
• Two workshops contributed to the IIASA project on the “Challenges and Opportunities of Economic Integration within a Wider European and Eurasian Space.” The first focused on trade policy regimes; the second on non-tariff barriers and technical regulations.
• World Population Program (POP) researchers held a training workshop on “Demographic Analysis and Computer Application” at the Asian MetaCentre, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand.
• A workshop on “Integrated Modeling of Food, Energy, Water Security Management for Sustainable Social, Economic, and Environmental Developments” presented mid-term results of the cooperation project between IIASA and the National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine.

For all IIASA events>>