Activities for 2016

In 2016 the Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program will continue to generate scientific advances in global change research as well as contributing timely, relevant advice to policymakers around the world.

Adapted from: © Miroslava Hlavačová | Dreamstime

Adapted from: © Miroslava Hlavačová | Dreamstime

ESM’s Agro-Ecological Systems group will develop EPIC simulations to include variations in nitrogen, phosphorus, and irrigation management. The group will also consolidate the EPIC developments for manure biogeochemistry and towards the minimization of agricultural impacts on the environment.

ESM’s Earth Observation Systems group will launch a European citizen science observatory – LandSense. The Picture Pile game developed by this group will also be extended to different themes, for example to aid humanitarian causes; and Picture Paint, a new game for annotating imagery, will be launched. The group is also planning research on the resilience of boreal forests.

The Environmental Resources and Development (ERD) group will expand the GLOBIOM model in 2016 to explicitly represent fish. This will improve the analysis of nutrition due to the large contribution that fish make to food security, especially in developing countries. ERD researchers will also look at the future of food and nutrition security by 2050 to assess trade-offs with conflicting sustainability dimensions such as greenhouse gas emission mitigation or biodiversity protection.

Further development of GLOBIOM by the ERD group will include enhanced representation of the forest-based industries to analyze the cross-sectorial and environmental impacts of improvements in relation to resource efficiency, circular economy, cascading use of wood, energy, and material substitution.

The Methods for Economic Decision-Making under Uncertainty (MEDU) group will work on a project to support promotion of compliance in carbon markets and pioneer innovative private-public financing models. This will help to create incentives for robust, long-term private investment in forest protection while deploying public financing and innovative finance approaches to mobilize private investment in the interim.

During 2016, the Policy and Science Interface (PSI) group will help develop a bottom-up (renewable) energy systems assessment and optimization for Indonesia for the Bali Clean Energy Forum and its Center of Excellence in order to expand the IIASA’s Tropical Futures Initiative activities beyond forests. The PSI group will also develop a global, geographically explicit energy systems model under the Integrated Solutions for Water, Energy, and Land project together with the Energy Program.

Under the EU project S2Biom, PSI will develop BeWhere for EU28-Balkan countries as well as Turkey and Ukraine, using a wide range of bio-energy technologies based on non-food feedstock. The group will continue to research boreal forest management while working to make Forest-Geo-wiki the online visualization tool for the new forest certification map. Finally, PSI will "translate" important findings of ESM research into policy-relevant language to help promote ESM’s integrated assessment tool box of global biophysical and economic models.


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Last edited: 17 March 2016

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Michael Obersteiner

Principal Research Scholar Exploratory Modeling of Human-natural Systems Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

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