Giacomo Falchetta
Research Scholar
Integrated Assessment and Climate Change Research Group
Energy, Climate, and Environment Program
Biography
Giacomo Falchetta is a research scholar in the Integrated Assessment and Climate Change Research Group of the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program. He joined IIASA in October 2021, after being affiliated with the Institute as a guest research scholar between 2018 and 2019.Falchetta is also affiliated with the Euro Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) and before joining IIASA, he worked as a research fellow in the Future Energy Program (FEP) at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM), a sustainability science research center based in Milan, Italy.
At IIASA, he has coordinated modeling activities of the Long-term Europe Africa Partnership on Renewable Energy (LEAP-RE), a joint initiative of the European Union and African Union. In 2024, he was awarded the IIASA Innovative and Bridging Grant (IBGF) to work on granular data approaches for urban-scale climate adaptation. An environmental economist by training, he is working on data-driven approaches for integrated energy-economy-environment analysis, with a specific focus on multi-level decisions (household, infrastructure, national, and global policy) related to climate change impacts and adaptation, as well as to sustainable development challenges, with a particular focus on the use of geographic information system (GIS) data and methodologies.
He has published over 40 papers in peer-reviewed journals and contributed to review reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA). He holds a PhD from the Department of International Economics of the Catholic University of Milan, Italy, a master’s degree in environmental and climate change economics from the London School of Economics, UK, and a bachelor’s degree in economics and social sciences from the Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy.
Last update: 05 NOV 2025
Publications
Falchetta, G. , Kasamba, C., & Parkinson, S. (2020). Monitoring hydropower reliability in Malawi with satellite data and machine learning. Environmental Research Letters 15 (1) e014011. 10.1088/1748-9326/ab6562.
Falchetta, G. , Gernaat, D., Hunt, J. , & Sterl, S. (2019). Hydropower dependency and climate change in sub-Saharan Africa: A nexus framework and evidence-based review. Journal of Cleaner Production 231 1399-1417. 10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.05.263.
Falchetta, G. , Pachauri, S. , Parkinson, S. , & Byers, E. (2019). A high-resolution gridded dataset to assess electrification in sub-Saharan Africa. Scientific Data 6 (1) art. 110. 10.1038/s41597-019-0122-6.