Summer Academy on Economic Growth and Governance of Natural Resources (MSA2015)

As the 21st century begins, humankind faces a challenge to find a wiser way to utilize Earth’s resources to maintain economic growth, in developing countries as well as in the industrialized world, while avoiding over-exploitation of ecosystem services and other natural resources. 

The global economy is still rooted in non-renewable resource exploitation; transition to renewable energy and sustainable resource use will occur only in response to incentives and institutional systems that reflect enthusiastic adoption of the need for change by policy-makers and business. This is a daunting task for many reasons, including complex feedbacks between the institutional and economic system that may lead to path-dependencies that hinder or prevent such transitions.

MSA 2015 provided an intensive and exciting educational program that includes lectures by world-leading researchers on systems analysis and mathematical modeling of critical transformations with global impact, accompanied by interactive seminars at which the School’s participants acquired experience in exploring and working on these topics.

Discussed themes

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• Endogenous growth theory and new drivers of economic growth: moving towards inclusiveness and sustainability
• Mutual feedbacks and different time scales of changes in institutional, economic, climatic, and ecological systems
• Nonlinearities, structural changes, regime shifts and tipping points in human-earth systems’ functioning: understanding, predicting and steering
• Incentivizing sustainable behavior: institution design
• Cooperation, fairness, and resource sharing
• The Arctic as a focal case of a non-linear social-ecological system undergoing rapid change
  

Participant blog posts and reports from the MSA2015

• M. Nazli Koseoglu Blog post: This summer in Moscow: Impressions from Moscow Summer Academy 2015. IIASA Nexus Blog. 5 November 2015
• Melina Kourantidou Blog post:  Challenges of marine decision making in the Arctic: Insights from the Moscow Summer Academy 2015 on how to model interplays between ecology and economic behavior 31 March 2016
  
• Melina Kourantidou Report:  Challenges of marine decision making in the Arctic: Insights from the Moscow Summer Academy 2015 on how to model interplays between ecology and economic behavior (PDF) 23 March 2016

Panoramic view of Alley and main building of Moscow State University.
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Last edited: 14 December 2017