Michael Obersteiner

Principal Research Scholar

Exploratory Modeling of Human-natural Systems Research Group

Advancing Systems Analysis Program

Biography

Michael Obersteiner is director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University. He first joined IIASA as part of the former Forestry Program in 1993. He was Program Director of the former IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program until June 2019, where he led and developed the ESM Program from its inception to an inter-disciplinary research cluster of over 100 staff. His background includes the fields of global terrestrial ecosystems and economics, having completed graduate studies both in Austria (BOKU University and the Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna) and abroad (Columbia University, New York, and the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk). His current research at IIASA stretches from modeling robust Earth system management and supporting the FABLE consortium, to economic stress-testing of supply chain networks.

Obersteiner has led large scale interdisciplinary research projects in the fields of integrated assessment of climate, energy, and land-use. He is the author of over 300 scientific papers covering a very wide range of science fields. He currently serves in the Climate Overshoot Commission and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)'s international resource panel. In addition, he is a lead convening author of two chapters of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and a steering member of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR)'s Global Assessment Report.

Last update: 28 NOV 2023

Publications

Crespo Cuaresma, J., Hlouskova, J., & Obersteiner, M. (2021). Agricultural commodity price dynamics and their determinants: A comprehensive econometric approach. Journal of Forecasting 40 (7) 1245-1273. 10.1002/for.2768.

Zhang, H., Yan, J., Yu, Q., Obersteiner, M. , Li, W., Chen, J., Zhang, Q., Jiang, M., Wallin, F., Song, X., Wu, J., Wang, X., & Shibasaki, R. (2021). 1.6 Million transactions replicate distributed PV market slowdown by COVID-19 lockdown. Applied Energy 283 e116341. 10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.116341.

Ermolieva, T., Ermoliev, Y., Obersteiner, M. , & Rovenskaya, E. (2021). Chapter 4 Two-Stage Nonsmooth Stochastic Optimization and Iterative Stochastic Quasigradient Procedure for Robust Estimation, Machine Learning and Decision Making. In: Resilience in the Digital Age. pp. 45-74 Springer. ISBN 978-3-030-70369-1 10.1007/978-3-030-70370-7_4.

Lesiv, M. , Shchepashchenko, D. , Buchhorn, M., See, L. , Dürauer, M., Georgieva, I. , Jung, M., Hofhansl, F. , Schulze, K., Bilous, A., Blyshchyk, V., Mukhortova, L., Brenes, C., Krivobokov, L., Ntie, S., Tsogt, K., Pietsch, S., Tikhonova, E., Kim, M., Di Fulvio, F. , Su, Y.-F., Zadorozhniuk, R., Sirbu, F.S., Pangin, K., Bilous, S., Kovalevskii, S.B., Kraxner, F., Rabia, A., Vasylyshyn, R., Ahmed, R., Diachuk, P., Kovalevskyi, S., Bungnamei, K., Bordoloi, K., Churilov, A., Vasylyshyn, O., Sahariah, D., Tertyshnyi, A., Saikia, A., Malek, Ž., Singha, K., Feshchenko, R., Prestele, R., ul Hassan Akhtar, I., Sharma, K., Domashovets, G., Spawn-Lee, S., Blyshchyk, O., Slyva, O., Ilkiv, M., Melnyk, O., Sliusarchuk, V., Karpuk, A., Terentiev, A., Bilous, V., Blyshchyk, K., Bilous, M., Bogovyk, N., Blyshchyk, I., Bartalev, S., Yatskov, M., Smets, B., Visconti, P., McCallum, I. , Obersteiner, M. , & Fritz, S. (2021). Global forest management data at a 100m resolution for the year 2015. 10.5281/zenodo.4541512.

Chang, J. , Gasser, T. , Smith, P., Herrero, M., Havlik, P. , Obersteiner, M. , Guenet, B., Goll, D.S., Li, W., Naipal, V., Peng, S., Qiu, C., Tian, H., Viovy, N., Yue, C., & Zhu, D. (2021). Climate warming from managed grasslands cancels the cooling effect of carbon sinks in sparsely grazed and natural grasslands. Nature Communications 10.1038/s41467-020-20406-7.