IIASA's research is interdisciplinary, integrated and cross cutting, therefore many of our activities focus on more than one of the areas as identified in the Strategic Plan. The below details research that addresses both Food and Water, and Poverty and Equity issues.
The Agro-Ecological Systems (AES) team joined the IMPACT2C project which explores the likely impacts of a 2°C rise in global mean temperature in Europe and in three vulnerable areas in other parts of the world outside Europe: Bangladesh, Africa, and the Maldives. more
Progress with EPIC crop modeling in 2013 allowed the Agro-Economic Systems (AES) group to join the international Ag-GRID initiative which aims to improve global gridded crop modeling. more
Results from IIASA's global land use model GLOBIOM model, adapted to the Congo Basin region - the CongoBIOM model - were used to inform a World Bank study on future deforestation trends in the Congo Basin published in 2013. more
The Agro-Ecological Systems (AES) team joined the IMPACT2C project which explores the likely impacts of a 2°C rise in global mean temperature in Europe and in three vulnerable areas in other parts of the world outside Europe: Bangladesh, Africa, and the Maldives. more
As environmental problems do not respect disciplinary boundaries, integrated assessment modeling, pioneered by IIASA, is a useful adjunct to environmental policy analysis, integrating knowledge from more than one domain into a single framework. more
The Agro-Ecological Systems (AES) team joined the IMPACT2C project which explores the likely impacts of a 2°C rise in global mean temperature in Europe and in three vulnerable areas in other parts of the world outside Europe: Bangladesh, Africa, and the Maldives. more
Risk, Policy and Vulnerability (RPV) staff introduced a new method to up-scale dependent loss distributions from natural hazards to higher spatial levels, explicitly incorporating their dependency structure over the aggregation process. more
In 2013 the Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program's Policy Science Interface (PSI) group together with ESM Forest Ecosystems Management (FEM) continued their involvement in the recharge.green project that aims to analyze bio-energy potential and impacts in the Alps from biomass, solar, wind, and hydro. more
As environmental problems do not respect disciplinary boundaries, integrated assessment modeling, pioneered by IIASA, is a useful adjunct to environmental policy analysis, integrating knowledge from more than one domain into a single framework. more
The aim of the project was to analyze two contrary and yet sustainable forest management options under the influence of climate change: maximization of forest stock and maximization of forest increment. more
Similarly to ecosystems, social systems – from firms to countries – are becoming more and more subject to various stressors whose effects penetrate throughout the system by means of social ties and economic links. The external disturbances here may be of political, economic, financial and even environmental nature. more
As the methods used to measure and inventory GHG emissions have significant uncertainties and gaps, the Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program has been developing an advanced methodology of a Terrestrial Ecosystems Full Verified GHG Budget. more
In a review paper, developed in cooperation with colleagues from the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies of Japan, scientists of the Mitigation of Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gases (MAG) Program argued that a multidisciplinary approach, involving the interplay with other policy objectives beyond air quality and climate, is needed to bring policies into line with current research on co-benefits. more
The Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program actively participated in two comparison exercises with the GLOBIOM model, looking at how the model reacts to different scenarios of climate change. more
In 2013 the Advanced Systems Analysis (ASA) Program made several new contributions to the development of optimal control theory for managing socio-environmental systems within a modeling framework. more
The Earth Observation System (EOS) group has developed "Cropland Capture," an online game that engages citizen scientists as data gatherers in global land cover research. The Cropland Capture game was listed among the top 10 education games of 2013. more
The Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program's Policy and Science Interface (PSI) team has been considering how to mitigate climate change through the use of carbon-neutral bio-energy (BE), combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS), to produce negative-emissions conditions. more
The Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program group on environmental resources and development (ERD) tackles the multiple interrelationships that exist between the natural environment and the human systems that actually or potentially affect it - population, land use, soil, water, chemicals, climate, crop management systems, and global trade. more
A Geo-Wiki study of more than 53,000 samples of human impact and land cover collected from over 60 individuals of varying expertise showed that the non-experts were as good as the experts at identifying human impact on land cover, and with additional training, could perform as well as experts. more
The Advanced Systems Analysis (ASA) Program has been working for several years on Web-enabled structured modeling, multi-criteria analysis, and infrastructure for sharing research databases, all aimed at supporting collaborative interdisciplinary research for decision support. more
The Advanced Systems Analysis (ASA) Program reviewed techniques available across various fields for characterizing the performance of environmental models with a focus on numerical, graphical, and qualitative methods. more
The Methods for Economic Decision making under Uncertainty (MEDU) group contributed to the first results of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP), a pioneering collaboration within the international scientific community. more
The Mitigation of Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gases (MAG) Program contributed to papers that highlight how the global nitrogen cycle could change in the 21st century and the extent to which this is reflected in the current set of global emission scenarios. more
The Advanced Systems Analysis (ASA) researchers in 2013 worked on developing new economic growth models capable of generating “green growth” and sustainable development solutions. more
The Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program’s Policy and Science Interface (PSI) group aims to strengthen various aspects of the role played by the ESM research program in the climate and land use change-relevant community. more
Comprehensive modeling of the effects of climate change, including extreme events, by RPV involves advanced techniques and takes into account stakeholder requests and needs. more
The Policy Science Interface (PSI) group of the Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program worked with ESM's Earth Observation Systems (EOS) to develop a new methodology to support assessment of, and decision making for, future forest management certification. more
The Advanced Systems Analysis (ASA) Program in 2013 looked at systems marked by interlinkages and interdependencies, where failure of one entity or a cluster of entities can cause a cascading failure capable of bringing down an entire system. more
New global emission scenarios enable a fresh perspective on air pollution trends in different world regions, and in particular on the importance of proper governance for future air quality. more
Sunday Y. Hosu presents a study characterizing the present and future vulnerability of smallholder farming households in contrasting agro-ecological zones in Eastern Cape Province. more
Alexandr Tarasyev discusses the building of a dynamic multiregional model with economic and demographic factors to provide insights into migration flows in Russia and the CIS region. more
Praveen Kumar Pathak describes the outcomes of his YSSP project, which provides new insights into fertility, by empirically exploring the potential role of social networks in shaping the fertility behavior of women in rural India. more
Talha Manzoor discusses his YSSP project work on better understanding the factors driving the dynamics of individual consumer behavior in order to identify policies favorable to sustainability. more
Markus Enenkel gives initial results of his YSSP project which focused on the development of i) a new, transparent drought index derived from satellite data and ii) a mobile phone application to speed up the assessment of food security-related vulnerabilities. more
Trond Husby summarizes his YSSP project, in which he analyzed the macroeconomic impacts on the Dutch economy that would occur if there were a partial shift in the allocation of risk from the public to the private sector. more
Eleanor Brush reports the results of her YSSP project, in which she asked i) is it possible for discriminators to stabilize cooperation? and ii) how does this depend on how much information the discriminators store and use? more
