Florian Kraxner

Biography

In his role as the Deputy Program Director, Florian Kraxner managed the IIASA Forestry (FOR) and Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Programs for the past 12 years, and headed the institute's Center for Landscape Resilience and Management (CLR) for the past five years. In 2021, he was appointed Agriculture, Forestry, and Ecosystems Services Research Group leader at IIASA, where - together with his team - he is focusing on biophysical ecosystems, land use, and landscape modeling, including forestry, agriculture, and renewable energy systems optimization. He has also been the leader of the renowned IIASA Tropical Futures Initiative (TFI), and his research includes a broad portfolio spanning forest and landscape restoration, carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDR) from nature-based and nature-climate solutions (NBS/NCS), ecosystems services assessments and related sustainability aspects, up to environmental safeguards assessments, including forest management certification. Biodiversity is a cross-cutting theme and the subject of ongoing efforts to improve the existing integrated biophysical land modeling tools in this respect.

Further to a broad project portfolio at IIASA, Florian Kraxner is also the principal investigator of a large-scale research and capacity-building project called RESTORE+, which aims at assessing landscape restoration with a particular focus on biodiversity in Indonesia and Brazil. The project is funded by the German BMU/IKI (7.2 million EUR/2017-2022).

He is particularly interested in the socioeconomic and ecological sustainability of natural resources management. Among other roles, Florian Kraxner serves on various scientific boards within the frameworks of Future Earth, the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), and the Asian Resilience Center, and he is president of the International Boreal Forest Research Association (IBFRA). He is also an official Austrian representative to several forest-related expert groups and teams under the FAO/UN-ECE Timber Committee. He was the host, organizer, and scientific chair of the large international 18th IBFRA Conference on Cool Forests, held in 2018 at the IIASA premises in Laxenburg, Austria. Further to his advisory roles on various boards, he has been invited to join multiple international scientific activities including the International Energy Agency / IEA Bioenergy, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, IUFRO, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF/US), the ClimateWorks Foundation (US), and the World Resources institute (WRI/US). Within the latter collaboration, he co-developed and coauthored the world's first
Carbon Dioxide Removal Primer, supported and funded by major US research organizations and philanthropic foundations.

Since 2006, Florian Kraxner has also been a visiting researcher with Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) to work on integrated urban-rural development concepts.
As of 2020, he holds a visiting professorship with the Division of Environmental Science and Biotechnology, College of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Korea University (KU), Seoul, South Korea.

He holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences from Hokkaido University Sapporo, and Bachelor and Master's degrees from the BOKU-University in Vienna, specializing in forestry, mountain risk engineering, and watershed management. Since 2000, he has been working in the fields of forest products certification and public opinion on the forest sector, inter-alia for EFI/Innoforce, MCPFE/Forests Europe, and FAO/UN-ECE. As a university lecturer at various international universities and international summer schools, he gathered distinctive teaching skills in the socioeconomics of forestry, forest policy, bioenergy, and wild land fires.

Prior to joining IIASA, Florian Kraxner also co-developed and coordinated BOKU's International Mountain Forestry Master Courses MSc Mountain Forestry and MSc Natural Resources Management and Environmental Engineering (Double Degree with University of Christchurch, NZ).


Last update: 22 OCT 2021