2015 was Australia's third year as a member country of IIASA with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) serving as National Member Organization.
Australia
Researchers from Australia and IIASA collaborated in a range of areas including:
Research into how to develop livestock production systems that are both more productive and have less of an impact on the climate;
A variety of internationally significant projects including Future Earth, the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium, and the Global Carbon Project
Significant opportunities for future collaboration remain both in research and capacity building activities.
The Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program’s Environmental Resources and Development (ERD) group has used the GLOBIOM model to analyze the consequences of climate change for the agricultural sector, with a focus on food availability consequences in developing countries. more
The Water (WAT) Program has extended work begun by the Global Water Systems Project, which focuses on human and ecosystem water security and assessing the investments required to enhance the resilience of the global water system over a 100-year time period. more
Collaborative land-use modeling work between IIASA, the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), the World Wildlife Fund Indonesia, and the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia was further developed in 2015 under the Tropical Futures Initiative (TFI). more
The successful completion of the fast-track analysis under the global Water Futures and Solutions (WFaS) initiative, is a major achievement of the Water (WAT) Program. The analysis has yielded the first set of multi-model, quantified scenarios of water demand with a focus on the domestic, industrial, and energy sectors. more
The Risk, Policy and Vulnerability (RPV) Program built on its breakthrough in assessment of flood-risk distributions which accounts for spatial correlation between river basins and therefore avoids underestimation of risk. The program has now incorporated different types of copula dependency measures, such as the Archimedian- and Frank-based copula, and various dependency structures. more
Collaborative land-use modeling work between IIASA, the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), the World Wildlife Fund Indonesia, and the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia was further developed in 2015 under the Tropical Futures Initiative (TFI). more
Explicitly accounting for population heterogeneity—in particular with respect to level of education—provides an analytical tool for anticipating future vulnerability. Community participation and strong social networks can also aid preparedness to natural disasters in vulnerable regions, shows new research conducted in the south of Thailand. more
Franziska Gaupp, of the University of Oxford, UK, used the copula methodology to model drought events and subsequent yield losses in regions that produce large proportions of the world’s food. more
Dian Andriana, of the Institute of Technology Bandung, Indonesia, used Radial Basis Function (RBF) Neural Networks to help reduce the uncertainty around predictions based on climate-related data. more
