Apr 23, 2014 | Alumni, Energy & Climate
By Alan McDonald, IIASA Alumnus (1979-82 and 1997-2000) and member of the IIASA Alumni Advisory Board
I stumbled on IIASA in 1975. I was 24 and working for General Electric’s Fast Breeder Reactor Department. I was supposed to figure out how safe General Electric should make its new breeder reactor, a type of nuclear reactor (The project later died when Jimmy Carter came to the White House and the uranium price plummeted). We researched what was going on around the world on determining acceptable risks. The best stuff was coming from this place outside Vienna called the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. We didn’t know IIASA was only two years old. We only knew its papers on determining acceptable risks were better than anyone else’s.
In 1977 I look a leave from GE to go to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In my second year I was a teaching assistant for Howard Raiffa and took his seminar on the art and science of negotiation. After graduation, I asked if I could get a job at IIASA. Perhaps in an administrative capacity, he thought, since I didn’t have a PhD. If I wrote a page about why IIASA should consider me, he might forward it to Laxenburg.
Wolf Häfele hired me for what was then called the Energy Systems Program (ENP). It was 1979, six years after the Arab oil embargo, the creation of OPEC, and an explosion of energy studies in the US and other oil importing countries. All those national studies projected national oil demands exceeding supplies by varying amounts depending on the policies being modeled. Then they labeled the unmet demand “imports.” IIASA was the first to check if all those imports might add up to more than the oil exporters could export, and what might be done about it if they did. In addition, ENP developed the energy supply model MESSAGE, now used in multiple national and international studies. Cesare Marchetti’s logistic model taught humility about dreams of quick policy-driven transitions away from oil. And ENP still had some of the world’s best work on risk acceptance — which had the added benefit of provoking Mike Thompson to analyze the issue through the lens of cultural anthropology and generate a whole new set of useful insights.
I met my wife, Sue, at IIASA. She was in Personnel and, when I arrived, briefed me about leave slips and all the rest. Part way through, she stopped. “You’re not listening,” she said. “If I have questions, I can come back,” said I. I did, and I did.
Two and a half years later we left IIASA, got married and did a 5-month road-trip honeymoon around the US on the theory it might be another 50 years before we were again so unburdened with obligations (right so far). The trip ended in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The US membership in IIASA was being exiled from Washington to Cambridge due to Dick Pearle’s and President Reagan’s animosity. I joined up to pitch IIASA’s virtues to foundations, US corporations and anyone who’d listen in Washington. In pitching IIASA’s virtues, there was a lot to work with.
Now there’s even more.
IIASA Alumni Day will take place on April 29, 2014, and we are inviting alumni to send their memories and photos of their time at IIASA. For more alumni memories, see the IIASA Alumni Web page.
From left, Alan McDonald, Sue (Buffery) McDonald, David McDonald (no relation), Walter Foith, Linda Foith, and Bill Godwin-Toby taking a break during the July 4th games, 1980.
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.
Mar 17, 2014 | Alumni, Poverty & Equity, Young Scientists
Lanoi Maloiy is a PhD student at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, and a participant in the recently completed 2013-14 Southern African Young Scientists Summer Program (SA-YSSP), which IIASA co-organizes with the South African National Research Foundation and Department of Science and Technology at the University of the Free State in South Africa. In this interview Maloiy talks about her research and her experience in the program.
Lanoi Maloiy Photo Credit: Stephen Collett
Why did you apply for the SA-YSSP?
I applied for the Southern African Young Scientists Summer Program because I envisioned the program would assist my research, especially regarding ways to improve the quality of life for Africans.
I’m from Nairobi, Kenya and from the Maasai tribe. Coming from Africa, I am passionate about improving the quality of life for all of the continent’s citizens. The Maasai are a culture that traditionally didn’t often value sending girls to school, but my parents really stressed the importance of education.
I have seen very clearly in my own life how having access to education makes a difference, and how it really presents a limitation for those who don’t have access to education. Especially for girls, not having that education really limits their options. This experience made me very passionate about education as a transformative tool. I believe that education is an important tool in eradicating poverty and eliminating oppression.
Please tell us about your project for the SA-YSSP.
My research for the SA-YSSP explores the educational experiences of Kenyan female political leaders evaluating the role of education in their leadership journey. I investigated social, cultural and historical issues regarding African women and education, including the leadership context in Africa. My doctoral work is an interdisciplinary study within the fields of gender, education, and African leadership. The study investigates the experiences of Kenyan female political leaders, and focuses on locating enablers or strategies to address the challenges women face while accessing leadership positions.
During the program I worked with IIASA population researcher Dr. Anne Goujon and my South African adviser Dr. Petronella Jonck. Working with them gave my research a new social psychology perspective which really enriched my work, because I come from an education and a leadership standpoint, it broadened my research examining it from the perspective of social psychology, evaluating the interaction and dynamics of gender within society.
I believe that this study will be beneficial to policy makers, and leadership practitioners. More studies on women leaders in Africa are essential to provide a global account of the experiences of women in leadership.
What methods did you use to conduct your study?
I did largely a qualitative study analyzing face to face interviews with 18 women political leaders in Kenya, which I had conducted in 2013. I went to where the women leaders were based, often to their constituencies or in parliament. The interviews included demographic questions, asking them about their education, qualifications, age, and marital status. Then the second half of the interview was more open ended, asking about their leadership journey, about their family background, educational background, and what factors enabled them, and factors that inhibited them, and in particular evaluating the role of education and personality. The last section of the interviews focused more on recommendations, asking their opinion on strategies that could be put into place to help women better access leadership positions. In particular, what African society could do better in terms of accommodating women, and also asking participants why it is important to have women take part in leadership, and how women leaders can enrich African society.
I will be submitting my report at the end of this month, and we plan to also submit a journal article on the work.
How has the program changed the way you think about or do research?
The SA-YSSP has informed the way in which I communicate my research, ensuring simplicity and clarity, especially to interdisciplinary audiences. It has also equipped me as an early career researcher, with knowledge and skills to locate avenues for transforming and improving the lives of Africa’s citizens through research.
What was the best thing about the SA-YSSP?
The SA-YSSP programme was an exciting and capacity building process, which provided a rich experience for me as an early career researcher. It afforded me with an invaluable learning experience. Attending lectures on writing scientific papers, systems analysis, including practical ‘hands on’ training in media communication enriched and extended my skills base. Interacting with a range of PhD students brought a new wealth of knowledge and provided a vibrant social experience. I truly appreciated the opportunity to contribute and engage in research life during the course of the summer program.
Where do you hope to go with your research career?
I have a strong desire to be part of research that transforms the lives of Africans, in particular through education and leadership development projects. I believe that attending the SA-YSSP has proved an important step towards my long-term goal of creating leadership development programs to improve the quality of life for Africans.
Lanoi Maloiy, right, with other participants in the 2013-14 Southern African Young Scientists Summer Program (SA-YSSP) Photo Credit: Rene Van Der Berg
Note: This article gives the views of the interviewee, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Mar 6, 2014 | Alumni, History
By Aviott John, IIASA alumnus
Anyone who has seen before and after photos of Schloss Laxenburg—the home of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)—knows what an incredible physical transformation the building went through between 1972 and 1981 to become the home of IIASA.
Aviott John with his daughter Megala. He worked at IIASA for 37 years.
The functional and organizational changes that happened inside Schloss Laxenburg as IIASA developed, were just as striking as the physical ones. Here was an abstract idea taking shape, not only in the wood and stone of Schloss Laxenburg, but in the various actions of people; in the recruitment of staff from more than 40 different nationalities who had never worked together before; in joint study programs to discover how large organizations work successfully under different political systems; and in the solution of common ecological problems in different parts of the world. No less important were the social interactions that formed the basis for deep friendships that ultimately provide the glue for successful international relations
Today the word globalization slips glibly off the tongue. The ability to travel was not so taken for granted in the world of the 1970s. There were many reasons for that, the most obvious being the political systems in place at the time and the relatively high financial cost of air travel. Today the challenge the Institute must face is perhaps not the financial cost of air travel, but its environmental cost. The Institute no longer just works across the divide between East and Western Europe as in Cold War days, but now across the barriers between developed and developing countries, on all continents of the world. And so the transformations continue. I feel privileged to have been an observer of some of these transformations for 37 years.
IIASA Alumni Day will take place on April 29, 2014, and we are inviting alumni to send their memories and photos of their time at IIASA. This post comes from Aviott John, longtime IIASA employee in the library and communications departments, who retired last year. To contribute, please contact IIASA Development Assistant Deirdre Zeller.
Before: View of the inner courtyard of Schloss Laxenburg, 1962
After: View of the Schloss Laxenburg inner courtyard after renovation in 1978
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.
Feb 18, 2014 | Alumni
By Martha Wohlwendt
IIASA’s Alumni Association is hosting its first Alumni Day on April 29, 2014, and we are inviting alumni to send their memories and photos of their time at IIASA. Our first post comes from Martha Wohlwendt, IIASA’s first employee, Executive Secretary/Administrative Assistant in the Director’s office. To contribute, please contact IIASA Development Assistant Deirdre Zeller.
From left to right: Martha Wohlwendt, Howard Raiffa, Vivien Schimmel
It was October 1972 when I joined IIASA. My first few days at the office, then located in Vienna’s 3rd District, were a bit confusing since there was only a lawyer taking care of matters. The first IIASA director, Professor Howard Raiffa, and the secretary, Dr. Andrei Bykov, had been travelling back and forth from their respective countries but had not yet arrived to stay.
Andrei Bykov took office shortly thereafter, then Professor Howard Raiffa and his wife Estelle arrived and with them his secretary Margot Sweet and his first assistant, Mark Thompson with his wife Elizabeth. In the weeks and months that followed, the initial team grew: we were joined by Prof. Letov, IIASA’s first Deputy Director, Silver Newton, Ruth Steiner, Julyan Watts, Vivien Schimmel, Claudia Staindl, to name a few. A personnel system was needed, and one of the first steps was to develop a staff numbering system. I was given number 001, as the first IIASA staff member. Andrei Bykov was to receive 002, but it was agreed by all that, because of his good looks and his nationality, he should be given 007.
The small IIASA team then moved to a beautiful villa in Baden – Haus Rosenauer – from which IIASA operated for almost a year. In the early spring of 1973 Howard Raiffa and I moved into the first office available in the Schloss – his office. Shortly thereafter approximately 10 more offices were handed over to IIASA.
My first Council Meeting, in January 1973, was quite an experience. We were very few and so much to do! You would see Andrei Bykov and me photocopying, sorting and then delivering the meeting documents to the participants in their hotels in my little Volkswagen Beetle. We also drove Council members from the airport to the hotels and back. Prof. H. Koziolek and his assistant, from the Academy of Sciences of the German Democratic Republic, had to squeeze into my Beetle from the airport to the hotel and then to IIASA.
Howard and Estelle Raiffa, with their warmth and appreciation for others, instituted a strong feeling of family which so many of us still remember today. They often invited the small staff to their apartment in the Operngasse for dinner, and Estelle would serve some of her delicious homemade dishes. It was during these years that we had the first 4th of July picnic organized by IIASA staff from the United States, the unforgettable celebration of the October Revolution, organized by the staff from the Soviet Union, the International Dinner, at which time all of us brought a national dish from our home country, the wine and cheese parties, the beer parties, and other IIASA events, some of which continue to this day.
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.
Nov 5, 2013 | Alumni, Food & Water
In a new commentary (subscription required) in Nature Geoscience, IIASA researchers Michael Obersteiner, Marijn van der Velde, and colleagues write about the problems facing the world’s food supply as we exhaust our supplies of phosphorus. Projections show that phosphorus supplies could run out in the next 40 to 400 years. In this interview, Obersteiner and van der Velde give more background on the “phosphorus trilemma.”
Fertilizers containing phosphorus are vital for crop production – but phosphorus is limited in availability and growing scarcer.
Why is phosphorus so important?
MV: Phosphorus is essential for life on Earth. It is a key component of DNA and cell membranes, and vital for cellular energy processes. Crops need phosphorus to grow. And to maintain crop production, and to make sure that soils remain productive, we have to add extra nitrogen and phosphorus as fertilizer. This is one of the food security issues in Africa where soils are suffering from nutrient depletion without replenishment.
Where do we get phosphorus and why is that supply in danger?
MO: Phosphorus is ubiquitous in the Earth’s crust. However, most of it is strongly bound in the soil , where plants cannot access it. Modern agriculture (which made human population explode) essentially began when we found ways to extract nitrogen from the air and phosphorus from minerals to make fertilizers for agricultural purposes.
The problem is that minable phosphorus is geographically concentrated in very few places. For example 75% of known reserves are located in Morocco and these reserves are limited. If, for example, political turmoil restricted access to the mines of Morocco, we would be in danger of short-term shortages that could lead to rising food prices or food insecurity in poor countries.
What problems do you expect as phosphorus becomes even more limited?
MO: The biggest problem we face is limited or no access to phosphorus fertilizers by the poor and food insecure.
MV: At the same time, rich countries apply excess fertilizers causing eutrophication to their lakes and rivers, while the poor cannot afford fertilizers.
What can be done about these problems?
MV: More efficient fertilizer application would make fertilizers cheaper to poor farmers, and at the same time help address the environmental problems. But in the long run we need to figure out how to produce food in a way that recycles nutrients at minimum loss rates. (This also includes losses from human excrement!)
To better solve the issues around long-term phosphorus availability and equitable use we also need better data on how much phosphate rock is remaining in the world and where it is located. Countries will need to be persuaded to collaborate on both these issues to ensure equity.
How does IIASA research inform this debate?
MV: In a paper we published earlier this year in PLOS ONE we showed the importance of soil phosphorus and the significant increases in yields that could be achieved in Africa with balanced micro-dosed applications of nitrogen and phosphorus. Available phosphorus in soils is generally low, especially in older weathered soils in the tropics where a lot of the phosphorus can be locked up in iron and aluminum complexes. We are currently investigating what application rates of nitrogen and phosphorus would be optimal for a range of soils and climates. This can then lead to better soil and nutrient management.
MO: In addition researchers in the Mitigation of Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gases program have been very active in finding solutions to the problem. For example: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/resources/multimedia/Podcasts/Our-Nutrient-World—Wilfried-Winiwarter-on-Reality-.en.html
What should people to know about this issue?
MO: Many things in nature that we like or depend on for our livelihood are substitutable. But phosphorus is in everything we eat and cannot be substituted by any element. If we continue business as usual we will squander this resource and thereby potentially compromising the wellbeing of our daughters and sons.
Further Reading
M. Obersteiner, J. Peñuelas, P. Ciais, M. van der Velde, and I.A. Janssens, 2013. The phosphorus trilemma. Nature Geoscience, 6, 897-898, doi:10.1038/ngeo1990 [COMMENTARY].
M. van der Velde, L. See, L. You, J. Balkovič, S. Fritz, N. Khabarov, M. Obersteiner and S. Wood, 2013.Affordable nutrient solutions for improved food security as evidenced by crop trials. PLoS ONE 8(4): e60075. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060075 [OPEN ACCESS].
Marijn van der Velde is a Research Scholar with IIASA’s Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program
Michael Obersteiner is the leader of IIASA’s Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program.
Oct 2, 2013 | Alumni, Energy & Climate, Science and Policy
By Anthony Patt, ETH Zurich and IIASA (From ETH-Klimablog)
The first of three working group reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was made public last Friday. Previous reports served as guidepost for climate policy development. And yet some policies were clearly more effective than others.
Over the next several months, the IPCC will release a series of three volumes, one from each of its three working groups, together constituting its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). The Working Group (WG) 1 report, on the science of climate change, was just published, while reports from WGs 2 and 3, covering climate impacts and adaptation, and the challenge of reducing or stopping climate change, respectively, appear in March and April of 2014.
Established by the United Nations in 1988, the role of the IPCC is to assess the state of the science, communicating it in a manner that is useful to policy-makers. Three of the previous four assessment reports have come at critical times in climate policy development. The first two supported negotiations of the current global treaty and its first major revision. The Nobel Peace Prize winning Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was released in 2007, intended to guide the negotiations to the successor to Kyoto.
The AR4 delivered a convincing two part message: that to avoid dangerous climate change the world must embark on a pathway completely eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from industry and land use change by the second half of this century, and that such a pathway is both technically and economically feasible. Many expected this message to lead to a successful negotiation process to be completed in Copenhagen in 2009.
International climate negotiations have made little progress, but the IPCC still has value, argues Patt.
But negotiators failed to reach an agreement in Copenhagen, and have made remarkably little progress in the four years since. Moreover, both the recently published AR5 WG1 report and early drafts of the WG2 report on climate impacts and adaptation suggest that their findings will strengthen those from AR4, but will not add anything dramatically new. Some say that the IPCC is no longer of any value. I disagree, for two reasons.
First, the most ambitious policy developments are now happening at the national level, with countries like Germany, Switzerland, and even the United States planning exactly the kind of transition away from fossil fuels and high emissions pathways that the AR4 suggested was both necessary and possible.1 There is reason to believe that the actions of this smaller number of countries will deliver the technological progress to make a global transition possible. Without the AR4, it is easy to imagine such countries having behaved differently, while the AR5 WGs 1 and 2 reports ought to provide added justification.
Second, deep differences of opinion have emerged concerning the best policies to achieve national decarbonization goals. Ten years ago, almost all analysts were convinced that carbon markets, i.e. trading in CO2 emissions certificates, represented the ideal policy instrument. But these have worked poorly, while portfolios of other instruments, including subsidies and regulations, have exceeded expectations. Researchers have studied these outcomes.e.g. 2 They have found, for example, that the more successful policy instruments are those that work to minimize the risks that investors in new technologies face.
The AR5 makes clear that an energy system transition remains necessary, and indeed now appears even more urgent than it did a few years ago. It is now possible for the IPCC, in its WG3 report, to provide a critical appraisal of alternative strategies. This is badly needed.
This post was originally published on the ETH Zurich Klimablog (in German).
1. Lilliestam, J. et al. An alternative to a global climate deal may be unfolding before our eyes. Clim. Dev. 4, 1–4 (2012).
2. Peters, M., Schneider, M., Griesshaber, T. & Hoffmann, V. H. The impact of technology-push and demand-pull policies on technical change – Does the locus of policies matter? Res. Policy 41, 1296–1308 (2012).
About the author
Anthony Patt is Professor at ETH Zurich, and a Guest Research Scholar in IIASA’s Program on Risk, Policy and Vulnerability, where he serves as head of the Decisions and Governance Research Group. His research is on the effectiveness of policies at addressing risks and uncertainties in the area of climate change, considering both the restructuring of energy systems and adapting to climate impacts and vulnerabilities. Read more>>
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.
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