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?
Event
Virtual meeting
IIASA Director General and CEO Albert van Jaarsveld will attend the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) Leadership Council Meeting - a virtual event bringing together eminent experts on sustainable development from academia, business, civil society, and the public sector.
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
04 May 2021
A new report released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) assessed the biophysical and economic benefits of air pollution policies in Arctic Council countries. The analysis relied on a suite of modeling tools, including the IIASA GAINS model, to project the impacts of increasingly ambitious policy action up to 2050.
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.