Johanna San Pedro is the latest addition to the Agriculture, Forestry, and Ecosystem Services Research Group at IIASA. We wanted to take this opportunity to share her journey before IIASA, her passions, and what makes her a unique addition to the FLAM team.
Johanna is well-positioned to bring invaluable insights to her new role in the FLAM team and is anticipated to significantly contribute to the ongoing projects. She will mainly help in the day-to-day operations of the FLAM team, where the focus is on developing and applying the wildFire cLimate impacts and Adaptation Model (FLAM), which is best used to reproduce historical wildfire events and project future burned areas. She will be involved in data processing, fire probability modeling, hotspot mapping and research publications.
Johanna has double master's degrees in European Forestry from the University of Eastern Finland and in Spatial and Ecological Modelling in European Forest Science from the Universitat de Lleida, Spain. Her professional background focused on natural resources management, environmental policy, and international collaboration on forest restoration. In addition, she has hands-on experience working on environmental project operations, project proposal preparation and forest monitoring.
© Pavel Kiparisov
Johanna San Pedro
Joining IIASA: Johanna sees her IIASA involvement as an opportunity to expand her knowledge and work on pressing ecological issues like climate change. She values all that IIASA has to offer, such as the opportunity for collaboration, an interactive and diverse working environment, and mentorship from a broad range of successful researchers. She believes that the work produced by AFE, such as their wildfire model FLAM, are important tools that help influence policy decisions regarding climate change and associated challenges. She is excited to contribute to projects with long-term and real-world impact. She’s keen to dedicate her time at IIASA to explore and expand the use of FLAM in socio-economic analysis, prescribing adaptive forest management strategies, and in policy formulation. Johanna looks forward to producing higher resolution outputs that will be useful in understanding and combatting wildfires, which have been accelerated climate change and pose a major threat ecologically and socio-economically. She is looking forward to promoting FLAM, improving the practicality of its use by forest owners as well as the policy and decision makers, and publishing research articles to share results and implications with the public in an understandable manner.
A Personal Touch: Johanna brings vibrancy to her professional life. She has dedicated her professional life theme song, "We’ve Only Just Begun" by The Carpenters, to her fresh start at IIASA. Coffee and peanut butter-flavored Snickers are her go-to brain-fuel. Outside the workplace, Johanna is a fur mom, foodie, and wanderlust. She is also a shutterbug and ukulele-strummer, an avid reader and a meme sharer – and we are excited to have her as part of the FLAM team!
A Note from Johanna: "I am thrilled to be part of a team that shapes solutions to global challenges. Here's to growing together and making a lasting impact!"
Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Johanna.
News
10 September 2026
Hop & Mop project’s Co-creation of mini-blocks: schoolchildren’s teamwork as the center of developing ideas
Schoolchildren are the stakeholders that will be benefit from the city not only for today, but also for a long time in the future. As such it is crucial to include them in designing their environment. They have a fresh eye on spotting the issues and can think creatively and at the same time critically to come up with ideas to develop their environment. Hop & Mop project is aimed to work with the schoolchildren to design mini-block prototype in the streets near their schools.
24 August 2026
Project "G/ArtenLeben": Turning gardens into biodiversity hotspots together
How can private gardens help support biodiversity in Austria? The new IIASA citizen science project G/ArtenLeben brings science and gardening practice together. At three G/ArtenCafés in Lower Austria, hobby gardeners are invited to contribute their knowledge and experience to research and work alongside scientists to explore how gardening can help biodiversity thrive.
06 August 2026
IIASA Director General: "This could be the coolest summer of the century"
As Austria experienced record-breaking temperatures on 4 August 2026, with more than 50 weather stations reporting all-time highs, IIASA Director General Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber joined Austrian public radio Ö1's Mittagsjournal to discuss what these extremes mean for the future, as well as why society must prepare for a much hotter climate.