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 Energy and Climate, and Food and Water issues.
Strategies for addressing climate change, land-use, energy, and water can and must go beyond strategic planning for individual sectors, says a new study. 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
Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) researchers studied climate change impacts on food security in four East Asian countries - China, Japan, South Korea, and Mongolia. 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
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
Changes in water availability and water temperature under climate change are likely to lead to higher electricity prices for most of Europe, according to a new study by IIASA's Water Futures and Solutions Initiative (WFaS). 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
For the EUCLIMIT Project ESM researchers contributed policy-related data and model results to illustrate the potential benefits and costs of various climate policies. 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
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
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
In 2013 substantive progress was made in extending and validating the IIASA EPIC model for major crops in Europe and for assessing the biophysical impacts of a mean 2°C temperature rise. 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
In 2013 the Forest Ecosystem Management (FEM) research group studied how to manage forests for maximization of forest stock and forest increment, as well as the availability of woody biomass for the energy sector. 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
A major focus of risk modeling work in Risk, Policy and Vulnerability (RPV) has been on flood risk, which is often considered the dominant extreme event hazard. 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
Through its integrated assessment work, the Energy (ENE) Program has played a central role in shaping community-wide climate research activities, including the so-called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). more
In 2013 the Advanced Systems Analysis (ASA) Program carried out simulations of the actions and interactions of autonomous agents in order to assess their effects on systems as a whole. 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
Avelino Mondlane describes how his knowledge of advanced systems analysis was furthered by using multicriteria decision analysis to quantitatively assess South African water and energy challenges. 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
Shaukat Ali, of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, and the Global Change Impact Studies Centre (GCISC), Ministry of Climate Change, Islamabad, Pakistan, explores the performance and sensitivity of climate and hydrological models across the Himalayan region to project climatic and hydrological changes over the next ten years. more
Xue Wang of the Institute of Geographic Sciences & Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Science, gives the outcomes of her YSSP project which aimed to provide science-based evidence to assist policymakers in alleviating water stress problems in the North China Plain. more
Kandice Harper describes her YSSP project in which she assessed the regional importance of SLCP mitigation measures in China using updated emission projections. 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
Dmytro Melnyk looks at the range of possible climate change impacts on Ukrainian agriculture, Ukraine's possible role in maintaining world agricultural production and food security under climate change, and the country's potential to increase agricultural exports. more
Kandice Harper describes her YSSP project in which she assessed the regional importance of SLCP mitigation measures in China using updated emission projections. more
Jacob Teter outlines his YSSP project work which looked at policies for the wise use of scarce water resources in energy infrastructure development, under GHG mitigation targets. more
Victor Maus summarizes his YSSP project in which he developed a methodology to improve information about land use and land cover trajectories in Brazil through the use of long-term satellite image data sets with high temporal frequency. more
