Article: Blog Post
12 May 2021
Disaster Risk Reduction investments bring a wide variety of benefits, including economic, ecological, and social, but in practice these multiple resilience dividends are often not included in investment appraisals or are not recognized by those making funding decisions. How do we change this?
Article: News
06 May 2021
Through combining their expertise, four European Research Council (ERC) grantees have awoken the scientific community to what nutrient imbalances could mean for our planet, and for our species. Their findings could lead the world towards more accurate climate modeling, more equitable policymaking, and more sustainable food production.
Event
IIASA at the International Conference “Risk Management in the Energy Sector 2021"
IIASA Deputy Director General for Science Leena Srivastava and IIASA Cooperation and Transformative Governance Research Group Leader Nadejda Komendantova will speak at the 4th International Conference “Risk Management in Energy-2021” focusing on the risks and opportunities in the global energy sector as a driver of the economy post COVID-19.
Article: News
03 May 2021
The terms “co-creation” and “co-production”, which denote the possibility for laypeople to participate in decision-making processes that affect their lives, have been gaining popularity. A new IIASA-led study explored options for empowering citizens as a driver for moving from awareness about the need to transform energy systems to action and participation.
Tool
The current state of the world affairs calls for a revival of systems thinking to improve decision-making. Recognizing that the tightening of socio-economic links heightens the need for holistic responses, that disciplinary and sectorial solutions are of limited effectiveness and efficiency, and that big data is not generating integrative perspectives by itself, highlights the need for policymakers to become thoroughly familiar with the promises and pitfalls of systems analysis. Challenges are systemic, dynamic, and interconnected, and systems analysis, coupled with an improved anticipation, provides a coherent methodology and necessary tools to develop new approaches so urgently required for more coherent and effective policy planning.
Tool
We are developing and applying a range of methods for integrated multi-attribute evaluation under risk, subject to incomplete or imperfect information, and evaluations of decision situations using imprecise utilities, probabilities, and weights, as well as qualitative estimates between these components derived from sets of weight, utility and probability measures. To avoid some mathematical aggregation problems when handling set membership functions and similar, we use higher-order distributions for better discrimination between the possible outcomes.
Event
Virtual Meeting, 13:00 to 15:00 (CEST)
This webinar, focusing on transboundary climate risk and adaptation, is organised by Adaptation Without Borders (AWB), The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and the World Adaptation Science Programme (WASP). It is one of a series convened to support researchers, policymakers and practitioners to further their knowledge and capacity and underpin effective adaptation to climate change.
Event
Federation of Austrian Industries, Vienna, Austria
The 6th Viennese Talks on Resilience and Networks is co-organized by IIASA and FASresearch. In an effort to support a convergence of ideas between systems ecology, complexity, ecomimcry, sustainability, networks, resilience and "building back better", authors of the recently published book “A New Ecology: Systems Perspective” are meeting in this workshop to provide insight into ecological principles.
Article: News
30 March 2021
IIASA researchers have used Sentinel 1 satellite imagery from the European Space Agency to produce a map of the extent and year of detection of oil palm plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand that will help policymakers and other stakeholders understand trends in oil palm expansion to inform landscape-level planning.
Model
The linkage algorithms solve the problem of linking models, e.g. sectorial and/or regional, into an inter-sectorial inter-regional integrated model. Linkage enables to avoid “hard linking” of models in a single code, which saves the programming time and enables parallel distributed computations of individual models instead of a large scale integrated model. Models linkage preserves the structure of the original models taking into account critically important details, which are usually missing in aggregate models.
Dataset
Stochastic Quasi-Gradient (SQG) methods have been developed for solving general optimization problems without exact calculation of objective function and constraints (let alone of their derivatives). SQG methods enable a sequential revision of approximate solutions towards the optimal using newly acquired information on the system, obtained via either direct on-line observations or(and) simulations.