Science across closed borders – the quest for restoring forests in North Korea

By Fanni Daniella Szakal, 2021 IIASA Science Communication Fellow

Despite the political challenges, 2021 YSSP participant Eunbeen Park is researching ways to restore forests in isolated North Korea.

© Znm | Dreamstime.com

North Korea is somewhat of an enigma and getting a glimpse into what transpires behind its borders is a difficult task. Based on our limited information, it however seems that its once luscious forests have disappeared at an alarming rate in the last few decades.

Deforestation in North Korea is fueled by economic difficulties, climate change, and a lack of information for effective forest management. As forests are recognized as important carbon sinks that are invaluable when working towards the climate goals established in the Paris Agreement, finding a way to restore them is imperative. Forests are also essential in solving food insecurity and energy issues, which is especially relevant in the face of the current economic hardship in North Korea.

Neighboring South Korea serves as a benchmark for a successful reforestation campaign after having restored most of its forest cover in the last half a century. South Korean researchers and NGOs are keen to support afforestation efforts in North Korea and it seems that the North Korean government is also prioritizing this through a 10-year plan announced by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un in 2015. The strained relationship between the two Koreas however, often hinders effective collaboration.

‘’We are close to North Korea regionally, but direct connection is difficult for political reasons. However, many researchers are interested in studying North Korea and there are currently many projects for South and North Korea collaboration supported by the Ministry of Unification,” says Eunbeen Park, a participant in the 2021 Young Scientists Summer Program and a second year PhD student in Environmental Planning and Landscape Architecture at Korea University in Seoul, South Korea.

North Korean countryside © Znm|Dreamstime.com

Modeling afforestation scenarios in North Korea

Park specializes in using remote sensing data for environmental monitoring and detecting changes in land cover. During her time at IIASA, she will use the Agriculture, Forestry, and Ecosystem Services Land Modeling System (AFE-LMS) developed by IIASA to support forest restoration in North Korea.

First, Park will use land cover maps dating back to the 1980s to map the change in forest cover. She will then identify areas for potential afforestation considering land cover change, forest productivity, climate, and different environmental variables, such as soil type. She will also develop different afforestation scenarios based on forest management options and the tree species used.

According to Andrey Krasovskiy, Park’s supervisor at IIASA, when selecting tree species for afforestation we need to take into account their economic, environmental, and recreational values.

“From a set of around 10 species we need to choose those that would be the most suitable in terms of resilience to climate change and to disturbances such as fire and beetles,” he says.

Challenges in data collection

A major challenge in Park’s research is obtaining accurate information for building her models. If there is relevant research from North Korea, it is not available to foreign researchers and without being able to enter the country to collect field data in person, her research has to rely on remote sensing data or data extrapolated from South Korean studies.

Fortunately, in recent years, remote sensing technology has evolved to provide high-resolution satellite data through which we are able to take a thorough look at the land cover of the elusive country. Park will match these maps with yield tables provided by Korea University based on South Korean data. As the ecology of the two Koreas are largely similar, these maps are thought to provide accurate results.

Is there space for science diplomacy?

“Research shouldn’t have any boundaries,” notes Krasovskiy. “In reality however, the lack of scientific collaboration between research groups in South and North Korea poses a major obstacle in turning this research into policy. Luckily, some organizations, such as the Hanns Seidel Foundation in South Korea, are able to bridge the gap and organize joint activities that provide hope for a more collaborative future.”

Despite the diplomatic hurdles, Park hopes that her work will find its way to North Korean policymakers.

“I expect my research might make a contribution to help policymakers and scientific officials establish forest relevant action in North Korea,” she concludes.

Enhancing science systems and bouncing forward sustainably from COVID-19

By Husam Ibrahim, International Science Council (ISC)

The IIASA-ISC Consultative Science platform has engaged transdisciplinary global thought leaders to produce four reports that focus on a more sustainable pathway to a post COVID-19 world. This blog post looks at the report on Strengthening Science Systems.

Credit: Adam Islaam – IIASA

Science has spoken reason to power and politics, expanded open science practices, and found a vaccine in record time during this pandemic, yet perceptions of how science has responded overall to the current crisis still vary. There is a broad consensus that there is considerable room for improvement in science systems in the general context of rapidly evolving global exogenous shocks.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is a cautionary tale about the importance and necessity of science: we will face crisis, we know that, and we will best address it through science, but science itself stumbles along and science needs to be more humble, be better educated and not only communicate their knowledge but also communicate the limitation of their knowledge so that science systems can move towards a better frontier.”

– David Kaplan, Senior Research Specialist, ISC 

In 2020, IIASA and the International Science Council (ISC) combined their strengths and expertise to define and design sustainability pathways that will help all levels of global governance be better prepared and more resilient in protecting from future systemic shocks.

In these testing times, policymakers and the general public have looked to science for insight, reliable solutions, and actionable advice. The Strengthening Science Systems report addresses how science systems can be better prepared when an inevitable crisis hits again.

The report puts forward a large number of recommendations, grouped under five interrelated major transformative changes:

Strengthen transdisciplinary research and networking on critical risks and systems resilience

As seen with the COVID-19 pandemic, risks can spread globally regardless of their origin. It is in the interests of all countries to work together and provide support to one another. Most notably, developed countries need to help further strengthen scientific capacities with financial support, technology support and technology transfer for developing countries.

On the other hand, while risks may be global, the manner in which they play out and particularly the way in which different societies respond, show considerable variation. Local scientific capacity has the ability to address the local context and develop effective strategies to address risk. This will allow local scientists to put knowledge on disaster risks at the core of disaster risk reduction policies.

Enhance communication of scientific knowledge, public understanding, and trust in science

Trust in science and in the recommendations emanating from scientists are key to the effectiveness of science-based policies. This is especially important as science denial and misinformation have increased during the pandemic. Communication, transparency, and broad public understanding of how science works are three foundations which will enhance trust in science.

Scientists themselves should therefore be incentivized to play a more active role in combating misinformation in their fields, as they are best equipped with the facts. Alongside that, easily accessible sources of scientific results that are simpler for a mass audience to understand should be created in a wider array of languages.

Enhance knowledge diffusion within the science system

Peer-review systems have been shown to be somewhat inadequate in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Peer-review systems need to be more agile, international, rigorous, and inclusive in terms of access and avoiding bias if science is to meet the challenges of future crises.

International organizations of science, including the ISC and UNESCO, can take a lead in devising a more effective system of peer review through dialogue with international disciplinary bodies, national academies, publishers, and national research councils.

Increase the capacity of the science system to respond rapidly to crises with high-quality research

Some countries lack adequate disaster research institutions. These institutes cannot be created in a short period of time and need prior infrastructural efforts, so there needs to be ample support and funding of smaller research institutions in advance of possible disasters. Collaborative efforts between big and small research institutes on a global and local scale are highly recommended. Governments also need researchers who can be on standby and they need to allocate funds that are easy to access during a crisis.

Improve the quality and efficacy of science-policy interfaces at national, regional, and global levels

Science advice has moved to center stage when dealing with policies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has challenged national science–policy systems. Lessons have been learned about how science can become a more effective input into policy. This involves further international scientific cooperation among institutions engaged in science-policy advice, to enhance the quality of science inputs to policy.

International collaboration allows for sharing of evidence and the emergence of a scientific consensus. This consensus can then be communicated to policymakers who, in turn, need to interact more with the wider academic community to systematically review their country’s policies.

These are some of the conclusions from the five lessons on interrelated transformative changes for the science system cited in the report. They show three axes of improvement that are required to ensure that science can react more efficiently to such exogenous shocks: increased agility, enhanced reliability, and a more effective science-policy-society interface. The main overarching objective is to simultaneously improve all three axes, thereby moving science systems to a new frontier.


Strengthening Science Systems

Read the full report

Read the one-page summary

 

You can also watch the discussion on Strengthening Science Systems as part of the launch event for the Bouncing Forward Sustainably: Pathways to a post-COVID World, which explores the key themes of Sustainable Energy, Governance for Sustainability, Strengthening Science Systems and Resilient Food Systems.

 

This blog post was first published on the website of the International Science Council. Read the original article here.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

Learning from COVID-19 and upgrading sustainable governance

By Husam Ibrahim, International Science Council (ISC)

The IIASA-ISC Enhancing Governance for Sustainability Report identifies the lessons learnt from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in relation to upgrading risk governance.

Credit: Adam Islaam – IIASA

As some governments and their administrations, individuals, and science systems begin to adapt to COVID-19, the struggle still continues in many countries. With that, the world is slowly leveraging the insights this pandemic has offered, standing at the cusp of a new world, which faces multiple stressors and is in need of more resilient governance.

Globally, national governments were put under the microscope. Some, such as Singapore and South Korea, succeeded with evidence-based, swift national leadership coupled with clear crisis communication. This proved useful for containing the spread of the COVID-19 virus and with it brought necessary recovery initiatives. In other countries, such as the United States, tackling the crisis has been characterized by governance challenges, including crisis plans with layers of shared responsibility being ignored in favor of “management by panic” approaches.

The pandemic has highlighted the flaws of neoliberal governance that prioritizes economic growth, deregulation and a separation between people and nature ahead of policies centered around human and ecosystem health and wellbeing.

To this effect, the IIASA-ISC Enhancing Governance for Sustainability Report goes beyond just considering the roles and responsibilities of governments, and adopts a broader definition of governance as, “the totality of actors, rules, conventions, processes, and mechanisms concerned with how relevant…information is collected, analyzed and communicated, and how management decisions are taken”.

In a world confronted with future risks such as spiraling climate change, ecosystem collapse and dwindling resources, global governance needs to be reformed.

The report states that the global community needs to engage in multi-directional and more integrated learning, problem identification and decision making. This should enable the shift towards more sustainable and equitable development in an ever-riskier world.

A disease with no respect for borders requires a collective response, said Volkan Bozkir, President of the United Nations General Assembly, adding that, “COVID-19 is a practice test that exhibits our weaknesses; we must build resilience now for whatever comes tomorrow.”

The pandemic highlighted widespread global fragmentation, which was initially observed through uncoordinated and sometimes competing actions. The report explains that organizations and agencies with similar objectives fought over resources, when instead they should have been bridging their divides and working cooperatively to eliminate competition. In the meantime, as the divide is bridged, special crisis provisions should be established for activation in case urgent action is needed again.

The report also recommends strengthening science–policy interactions to enable evidence-based decision-making, in which science systems collaborate with governments at all governance levels. Global and regional collaboration is especially important given the uneven scientific capabilities across countries and the need to tackle the pandemic everywhere to achieve health outcomes for all.

Working effectively at the interface of science and policy has been a challenge for many countries, which warrants further investigation. However, scientists have tried to step up to the challenges in some unprecedented ways.

For example, online repositories started publishing COVID-19 studies as pre-prints so that their findings could be used by all scientists quickly. As a result, researchers have identified and shared hundreds of viral genome sequences, and several hundreds of clinical trials have been launched, bringing together hospitals and laboratories around the globe.

Mukhisa Kituyi, the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, referred to international scientific collaboration in reference to COVID-19, as the “engine of global science” and said, “It is thus crucial that scientific responses are based on international collaboration that brings together the best minds and available data from different countries for the benefit of all”

Therefore, to reform global governance, evidence-sharing arrangements need to be centered on a global level with reliable evidence, which must be made available swiftly in times of crises. In order for this to happen, the report recommends the creation of specialized advisory bodies that offer consultations on a regular and on-demand basis. The report also suggests involving diverse stakeholder perspectives in these consultations.

Another key point to enhancing sustainable governance is risk reduction management, which should be a fundamental component of decision-making and a part of the investment in sustainable development. The report states that a global socio-ecological resilience and risk dialogue should be launched, engaging policymakers, civil society, the private sector, and the scientific community in mapping risks and their drivers at different scales and discussing their implications for risk governance, prevention and preparedness. Such an engagement process would increase the understanding and communication of the compound, systemic nature of risks driven by infectious diseases, climate change, and other socio-ecological stressors.

“A more holistic approach to risk that better takes into account the many intricate links between nature and people is sorely needed if we are to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.”

– Anne-Sophie Stevance, ISC

Unifying fragmented global organizations and governance, forming scientific evidence-based policies with the help of science systems, and enhancing levers pertaining to risk management are only some of the recommendations in the report. For more information on upgrading risk governance read the IIASA-ISC Enhancing Governance for Sustainability Report.

You can also watch the discussion on Learning from COVID-19 and upgrading sustainable governance as part of the launch event for the Bouncing Forward Sustainably: Pathways to a post-COVID World initiative, which explores the key themes of Sustainable Energy, Governance for Sustainability, Strengthening Science Systems, and Resilient Food Systems.

 

This blog post was first published on the website of the International Science Council. Read the original article here.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

Plan S: Promoting full and immediate Open Access publishing

By Luke Kirwan, IIASA Repository and Open Access Manager

IIASA Repository and Open Access Manager Luke Kirwan explains the ins-and-outs of the Plan S policy towards full and immediate Open Access publishing.

With Plan S, which has been implemented from 1 January 2021, new Open Access requirements come into force for project participants, which are intended to accelerate the transformation to complete and immediate Open Access. This has implications for researchers obtaining funding from funders supporting Plan S, such as the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) or Formas (a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development).

What exactly is Plan S?

Plan S is an initiative that aims to promote making research immediately open access without embargo periods or restrictions. It requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. A number of national and international research bodies, including the FWF and the European Research Council (ERC), are working jointly on the implementation of Plan S and the promotion of open access research publication. A list of these funding bodies can be found here and more detailed information on the implementation of Plan S is available here.

What you need to know

Starting from 1 January 2021, publications derived from research funded by Plan S research organizations must be made openly accessible immediately upon publication without any embargo period. This applies only to projects submitted after 1 January 2021. Furthermore, this material must be made available under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY). In some instances, a more restrictive license can be applied, but this must be discussed with the funding body.

Further guidelines are currently being developed for publications that are not journal articles such as books and edited volumes. From 2021 onwards, it is important to closely check the requirements of research funders to ensure that projects are compliant with any open access requirements they may have.

Papers published under Plan S funding has to include an appropriate acknowledgement. In the case of FWF funded research, it must for example follow the following format:

‘This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [Grant number]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.’

Authors of papers published under Plan S funding will retain the copyright of their work, and will be providing journals with a license to publish their material rather than fully transferring copyright to them. Publishers that require a license to publish must allow the authors to make either the published version, or the accepted version, immediately available under an open license. No embargo period is permitted.

Routes to compliance

  • Publish in an open access journal
  • Make the accepted manuscript immediately available in an open access repository (like PURE) under a CC-BY license
  • Publish in a subscription journal where IIASA has an open access agreement (For a list of IIASA’s current agreements please see here)

COAlition S has provided a journal checker tool so that you can check a journals compliance with the Plan S requirements.

The FWF’s statement and guidelines for Plan S can be found here. The operation and success of Plan S will be reviewed by the end of 2024. For any further information or assistance, please contact the library.

Related links:

Science family of journals announces change to open-access policy (Jan 2021)

Nature journals reveal terms of landmark open-access option (NOV 2020)

Plan S toolkit (coalition S website)

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

Open science has to go beyond open source

By Daniel Huppmann, research scholar in the IIASA Energy Program

Daniel Huppmann sheds light on how open-source scientific software and FAIR data can bring us one step closer to a community of open science.

© VectorMine | Dreamstime.com

Over the past decade, the open-source movement (e.g., the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI)) has had a tremendous impact on the modeling of energy systems and climate change mitigation policies. It is now widely expected – in particular by and of early-career researchers – that data, software code, and tools supporting scientific analysis are published for transparency and reproducibility. Many journals actually require that authors make the underlying data available in line with the FAIR principles – this acronym stands for findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The principles postulate best-practice guidance for scientific data stewardship. Initiatives such as Plan S, requiring all manuscripts from projects funded by the signatories to be released as open-access publications, lend further support to the push for open science.

Alas, the energy and climate modeling community has so far failed to realize and implement the full potential of the broader movement towards collaborative work and best practice of scientific software development. To live up to the expectation of truly open science, the research community needs to move beyond “only” open-source.

Until now, the main focus of the call for open and transparent research has been on releasing the final status of scientific work under an open-source license – giving others the right to inspect, reuse, modify, and share the original work. In practice, this often means simply uploading the data and source code for generating results or analysis to a service like Zenodo. This is obviously an improvement compared to the previously common “available upon reasonable request” approach. Unfortunately, the data and source code are still all too often poorly documented and do not follow best practice of scientific software development or data curation. While the research is therefore formally “open”, it is often not easily intelligible or reusable with reasonable effort by other researchers.

What do I mean by “best practice”? Imagine I implement a particular feature in a model or write a script to answer a specific research question. I then add a second feature – which inadvertently changes the behavior of the first feature. You might think that this could be easily identified and corrected. Unfortunately, given the complexity and size to which scientific software projects tend to quickly evolve, one often fails to spot the altered behavior immediately.

One solution to this risk is “continuous integration” and automated testing. This is a practice common in software development: for each new feature, we write specific tests in an as-simple-as-possible example at the same time as implementing the function or feature itself. These tests are then executed every time that a new feature is added to the model, toolbox, or software package, ensuring that existing features continue to work as expected when adding a new functionality.

Other practices that modelers and all researchers using numerical methods should follow include using version control and writing documentation throughout the development of scientific software rather than leaving this until the end. In addition, not just the manuscript and results of scientific work should be scrutinized (aka “peer review”), but such appraisal should also apply to the scientific software code written to process data and analyze model results. In addition, like the mentoring of early-career researchers, such a review should not just come at the end of a project but should be a continuous process throughout the development of the manuscript and the related analysis scripts.

In the course that I teach at TU Wien, as well as in my work on the MESSAGEix model, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C scenario ensemble, and other projects at the IIASA Energy Program, I try to explain to students and junior researchers that following such best-practice steps is in their own best interest. This is true even when it is just a master’s thesis or some coursework assignment. However, I always struggle to find the best way to convince them that following best practice is not just a noble ideal in itself, but actually helps in doing research more effectively. Only when one has experienced the panic and stress caused by a model not solving or a script not running shortly before a submission deadline can a researcher fully appreciate the benefits of well-structured code, explicit dependencies, continuous integration, tests, and good documentation.

A common trope says that your worst collaborator is yourself from six months ago, because you didn’t write enough explanatory comments in your code and you don’t respond to emails. So even though it sounds paradoxical at first, spending a bit more time following best practice of scientific software development can actually give you more time for interesting research. Moreover, when you then release your code and data under an open-source license, it is more likely that other researchers can efficiently build on your work – bringing us one step closer to a community of open science!

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.