Edward Byers
Research Scholar
Integrated Assessment and Climate Change Research Group
Energy, Climate, and Environment Program
Research Scholar
Sustainable Service Systems Research Group
Energy, Climate, and Environment Program
Biography
Edward Byers is a research scholar in the Energy, Climate and Environment (ECE) Program (Integrated Assessment and Climate Change research group), with research interests in infrastructure systems, water and climate change risks, the water-energy nexus, development economics and vulnerability. He joined IIASA in 2016, as an IIASA Postdoctoral Research Fellow in both the Energy and Water programs. Dr Byers' research at IIASA is on climate change impacts to the energy and water sectors using global impact, hydrological and integrated assessment models. This has subsequently contributed to various recent publications on global climate hotspots, seasonal pumped storage, electricity access, hydro-climate risks to electricity sector, cooling demands and the cooling gap, water-energy-land nexus in the Indus basin, among others(Google Scholar).Most prominently, he led the global climate and vulnerability hotspots assessment and development of www.hotspots-explorer.org as part of the GEF-IIASA-UNIDO funded project on Integrated Solutions for Water, Energy and Land - work that has featured in Nature and the New York Times. This work has continued through various projects and applications, including technical assistance to countries via the Green Climate Fund.
He was contributing author to various chapters of the 2018 IPCC Special Report on 1.5C, 2019 IPCC Special Report on Climate Change on Land and in the ongoing IPCC 6th Assessment Report in Working Group III. He currently coordinates the collection and management of the climate mitigation scenarios database in support of WGIII as a chapter scientist.
Dr. Byers is an associate deputy editor for the journal Climatic Change. At IIASA, he is a staff-elected member of the Scientific Leadership Committee. Previous work includes water use of electricity pathways, climate impacts on CCS power plants, climate impacts on capacity expansion modeling, catchment hydrology and simulation of water withdrawal licensing regimes.
Dr. Byers joined IIASA from the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford where he investigated economic impacts of drought on the energy sector in the UK. Dr. Byers' PhD research at Newcastle University investigated current and future water use of the UK electricity sector, assessed at national, regional and catchment scales, and contributed to activities of the UK Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium. Previously, he he trained as a civil and environmental engineer (M.Eng, Newcastle). He was lead author of Working Paper 9 (Energy: coal, oil, gas, and nuclear) to the LWEC Climate Risks to Infrastructure Report Card (2014), and also performed similar climate risk analysis in consultancy with the national power producer of Turkey (2014-15). Dr. Byers was on the DECC Youth Advisory Panel in 2011, from 2012-2014 he was Scientific Officer of the Planet Earth Institute and from 2014-2016 was Energy Topic Editor of Global Water Forum.
Last update: 07 JAN 2021
Publications
Ilyas, A., Parkinson, S. , Vinca, A. , Byers, E. , Manzoor, T., Riahi, K. , Willaarts, B. , Siddiqi, A., & Muhammad, A. (2022). Balancing smart irrigation and hydropower investments for sustainable water conservation in the Indus basin. Environmental Science & Policy 135 147-161. 10.1016/j.envsci.2022.04.012.
Kikstra, J.S. , Nicholls, Z.R.J., Smith, C.J. , Lewis, J., Lamboll, R.D., Byers, E. , Sandstad, M., Meinshausen, M., Gidden, M.J. , Rogelj, J. , Kriegler, E., Peters, G.P., Fuglestvedt, J.S., Skeie, R.B., Samset, B.H., Wienpahl, L., van Vuuren, D.P., van der Wijst, K.-I., Al Khourdajie, A., Forster, P.M., Reisinger, A., Schaeffer, R., & Riahi, K. (2022). The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report WGIII climate assessment of mitigation pathways: from emissions to global temperatures. Preprint 10.5194/egusphere-2022-471.
Satoh, Y., Yoshimura, K., Pokhrel, Y., Kim, H., Shiogama, H., Yokohata, T., Hanasaki, N., Wada, Y. , Burek, P. , Byers, E. , Müller Schmied, H., Gerten, D., Ostberg, S., Gosling, S.N., Boulange, J.E.S., & Oki, T. (2022). The timing of unprecedented hydrological drought under climate change. Nature Communications 13 (1) e3287. 10.1038/s41467-022-30729-2.
DeAngelo, J., Azevedo, I., Bistline, J., Clarke, L., Luderer, G., Byers, E. , & Davis, S.J. (2021). Energy systems in scenarios at net-zero CO2 emissions. Nature Communications 12 (1) e6096. 10.1038/s41467-021-26356-y.
Mastrucci, A. , van Ruijven, B. , Byers, E. , Poblete-Cazenave, M., & Pachauri, S. (2021). Global scenarios of residential heating and cooling energy demand and CO2 emissions. Climatic Change 168 (3-4) e14. 10.1007/s10584-021-03229-3.