Running global models in a castle in Europe

By Matt Cooper, PhD student at the Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, and 2018 winner of the IIASA Peccei Award

I never pictured myself working in Europe.  I have always been an eager traveler, and I spent many years living, working and doing fieldwork in Africa and Asia before starting my PhD.  I was interested in topics like international development, environmental conservation, public health, and smallholder agriculture. These interests led me to my MA research in Mali, working for an NGO in Nairobi, and to helping found a National Park in the Philippines.  But Europe seemed like a remote possibility.  That was at least until fall 2017, when I was looking for opportunities to get abroad and gain some research experience for the following summer.  I was worried that I wouldn’t find many opportunities, because my PhD research was different from what I had previously done.  Rather than interviewing farmers or measuring trees in the field myself, I was running global models using data from satellites and other projects.  Since most funding for PhD students is for fieldwork, I wasn’t sure what kind of opportunities I would find.  However, luckily, I heard about an interesting opportunity called the Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) at IIASA, and I decided to apply.

Participating in the YSSP turned out to be a great experience, both personally and professionally.  Vienna is a wonderful city to live in, and I quickly made friends with my fellow YSSPers.  Every weekend was filled with trips to the Alps or to nearby countries, and IIASA offers all sorts of activities during the week, from cultural festivals to triathlons.  I also received very helpful advice and research instruction from my supervisors at IIASA, who brought a wealth of experience to my research topic.  It felt very much as if I had found my kind of people among the international PhD students and academics at IIASA.  Freed from the distractions of teaching, I was also able to focus 100% on my research and I conducted the largest-ever analysis of drought and child malnutrition.

© Matt Cooper

Now, I am very grateful to have another summer at IIASA coming up, thanks to the Peccei Award. I will again focus on the impact climate shocks like drought have on child health.  however, I will build on last year’s research by looking at future scenarios of climate change and economic development.  Will greater prosperity offset the impacts of severe droughts and flooding on children in developing countries?  Or does climate change pose a hazard that will offset the global health gains of the past few decades?  These are the questions that I hope to answer during the coming summer, where my research will benefit from many of the future scenarios already developed at IIASA.

I can’t think of a better research institute to conduct this kind of systemic, global research than IIASA, and I can’t picture a more enjoyable place to live for a summer than Vienna.

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.

Shaping my scientific career

By Davit Stepanyan, PhD candidate and research associate at Humboldt University of Berlin, International Agricultural Trade and Development Group and 2019 IIASA Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) Award Finalist.

Participating in the YSSP at IIASA was the biggest boost to my scientific career and has shifted my research to a whole new level. IIASA provides a perfect research environment, especially for young researchers who are at the beginning of their career paths and helps to shape and integrate their scientific ideas and discoveries into the global research community. Being surrounded by leading scientists in the field of systems analysis who were open to discuss my ideas and who encouraged me to look at my own research from different angles was the most important push during my PhD studies. Having the work I did at IIASA recognized with an Honorable Mention in the 2019 YSSP Awards has motivated me to continue digging deeper into the world of systems analysis and to pursue new challenges.

© Davit Stepanyan

Although my background is in economics, mathematics has always been my passion. When I started my PhD studies, I decided to combine these two disciplines by taking on the challenge of developing an efficient method of quantifying uncertainties in large-scale economic simulation models, and so drastically reduce the need and cost of big data computers and data management.

The discourse on uncertainty has always been central to many fields of science from cosmology to economics. In our daily lives when making decisions we also consider uncertainty, even if subconsciously: We will often ask ourselves questions like “What if…?”, “What is the chance of…?” etc. These questions and their answers are also crucial to systems analysis since the final goal is to represent our objectives in models as close to reality as possible.

I applied for the YSSP during my third year of PhD research. I had reached the stage where I had developed the theoretical framework for my method, and it was the time to test it on well-established large-scale simulation models. The IIASA Global Biosphere Management Model (GLOBIOM), is a simulation model with global coverage: It is the perfect example of a large-scale simulation model that has faced difficulties applying burdensome uncertainty quantification techniques (e.g. Monte Carlo or quasi-Monte Carlo).

The results from GLOBIOM have been very successful; my proposed method was able to produce high-quality results using only about 4% of the computer and data storage capacities of the above-mentioned existing methods. Since my stay at IIASA, I have successfully applied my proposed method to two other large-scale simulation models. These results are in the process of becoming a scientific publication and hopefully will benefit many other users of large-scale simulation models.

Looking forward, despite computer capacities developing at high speed, in a time of ‘big data’ we can anticipate that simulation models will grow in size and scope to such an extent that more efficient methods will be required.

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.

Closing funding gaps and building bridges with the IIASA network

By Marzena Anna Adamczuk, Development Officer, Office of Sponsored Research, IIASA

YSSP Fund recipients from 2011 to 2018

The 27 fellows smiling at you from the photograph are all part of the IIASA global network of system thinkers thanks to the Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) Fund. The YSSP Fund accepts donations from the IIASA community and directs the proceeds to support young scholars who are not eligible to receive a stipend from an IIASA National Member Organization.

The IIASA experience has had a profound influence on the lives of previous recipients, and has brought them closer to answering some of their most pertinent research questions. J. Luke Irwin (2018 YSSP Fund), for example, was able to explore which jobs and skills are the least automation resilient and how policymakers and academic institutions should address future unemployment caused by automation. Another previous beneficiary of the fund, Diana Erazo (2016 YSSP Fund), looked at the transmission dynamics of Chagas disease – one of the most neglected tropical diseases in Latin America – and the most efficient strategies to contain it.

Since its inception in 2011, the YSSP Fund has opened the IIASA door to 27 young researchers from Ethiopia, Thailand, India, China, Colombia, Brazil, and many other countries. All these scholars have since become an important part of the IIASA worldwide network, enriching the institute’s research portfolio and planting the seeds of their newly acquired systems analysis expertise in their home countries.

This bridge-building and door-opening capacity of the YSSP Fund is what inspires many members of the IIASA family to support it every year. Ever since I was appointed as development officer at IIASA in 2014, I have been privileged to accept donations from former IIASA directors, eminent researchers, and renowned experts in a variety of fields. We are all united in our belief that supporting the YSSP Fund is a great investment in future generations of researchers and an important token of trust in IIASA and its flagship capacity-building program.

Many of our alumni donors are former YSSP fellows, who appreciate the impact the program has had on their careers. One of them is Petr Aven, who was part of the first YSSP cohort in 1977 and still remembers this experience as the best time of his life. Some of our alumni, who were themselves recipients of the YSSP Fund scholarship, see it as their duty and privilege to give back. One of our most distinguished donors, Dr. Roger Levien, former director of IIASA and the founder of the YSSP, hopes that his donations will help build a bridge between IIASA and Pardee RAND Graduate School, of which he is an alumnus as well. The motivation behind our most recent pledge from Professors Jyoti and Kirit Parikh is to expose young minds to systems analysis and to promote research-based policymaking.

After the annual fundraising campaign is over and the IIASA network lives up to the challenge for yet another year, I find it very gratifying to be able to channel the support coming from the IIASA community to the YSSP Fund recipients. My favorite time of the year is June when I get to meet the lucky recipients of the scholarships, learn all about their plans and ambitions for the summer at IIASA, and see how motivated they are to make the most of their time at the institute.

However, the real satisfaction kicks in when I see the YSSP Fund fellows thrive in their post-IIASA careers. With immense support from our alumni officer and the Communication Department, we take great pride in sharing their successes with the IIASA worldwide community. We see it as a token of gratitude to both the donors, who opened the IIASA door to them, as well as to their IIASA supervisors, who generously shared their expertise and continue to mentor them after their summer at the institute is over.

Speaking of successes, Gbemi Samuel (2017 YSSP Fund), the first Nigerian to ever participate in the program has recently published a well-received article in the Journal of African Population Studies describing her research on estimating how many children under five could be prevented from dying if women in Nigeria used cleaner fuels to cook their family meals. Lu Liu, a 2016 YSSP Fund recipient published her first-authored paper in Environmental Research Letters and had a poster presentation at the AGU Fall Meeting in Washington D.C. We are also very proud of Zhimin Mao’s (2015 YSSP Fund) post-IIASA career, starting from her IIASA Peccei Award in 2015 and leading up to her current position at the World Bank. We can hardly wait to boast about the successes and accomplishments of our 2018 YSSP Fund fellows and hope they will stay in touch.

Every donation to the YSSP Fund goes a long way. Help us close more funding gaps this summer and support the next generation of system thinkers!

2018 YSSP Fund recipients: (L-R) Ekaterina Antsygina, Luke Irwin, Sara Turner, Fabio Diuana, Ankita Srivastava, Muhammad Nurariffudin, Fumi Harahap

Support the 2019 YSSP Fund

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.

Finding community at the AGU Fall Meeting

By Lu Liu, postdoctoral research associate at Rice University, USA and IIASA YSSP 2016 participant

I have been attending the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting since 2013 when I was working with the Joint Global Change Research Institute. Ever since then, the AGU Fall Meeting has become one of my most anticipated events of the year where I get to share my research and make new friends.

The first time I attended the AGU Fall Meeting, I was overwhelmed with the size and scale of this conference. There are more than 20,000 oral and poster presentations throughout the week, and the topics cover nearly 30 different themes, from earth and space science, to education and public affairs. I was thrilled to see my research being valued and discussed by people from various backgrounds, and I was fascinated by other exciting research and rigorous ideas that emerged at the meeting.

Lu Liu at 2018 AGU poster session

Lu Liu at 2018 AGU poster session

At this year’s AGU, I presented my poster Implications of decentralizing urban water supply infrastructure via direct potable water reuse (DPR) in a session titled Water, Energy, and Society in Urban Systems. In a nutshell, my poster presents a quantitative model that evaluates the cost-benefits of direct potable water reuse in a decentralized water supply system. The concept of decentralization in an urban water system has been discussed in previous literature as an effective approach towards sustainable urban water management. Besides the social and technical barriers in implementing decentralization, there is a lack of analytical and computational tools necessary for the design, characterization, and evaluation of decentralized water supply infrastructure. My study bridges the gap by demonstrating the environmental and economic implications of decentralizing urban water infrastructure via DPR using a modeling framework developed in this study. The quantitative analysis suggests that with the appropriate configuration, decentralized DPR could potentially alleviate stress on freshwater and enhance urban water sustainability and resilience at a competitive cost. More about this research and my other work can be found here: https://emmaliulu.wixsite.com/luliu.

At the AGU Fall Meeting, I engaged in various opportunities to reconnect with old colleagues and build new professional relationships. What’s better than running into my former YSSP supervisors and IIASA colleagues after two years since I left the YSSP? Although my time spent at IIASA was short, I hold IIASA and the YSSP very close to my heart because the influence this experience has had on my professional and personal life is profound.

I will continue to attend the AGU Fall Meeting for the foreseeable future. After all, we all want to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance in a community, and I am glad I already found mine.

 

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.

How culture affects perceptions of climate change related technology

By Farid Karimi, independent researcher and IIASA alumnus

There is consensus that the current trend of energy consumption growth and CO2 emissions cannot continue if global warming is to be tackled. Many countries have considered carbon capture and storage (CCS) for addressing climate change. CCS is a technology that mitigates CO2 emissions by removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in carbon sinks–in other words, in an environment or reservoir that has the ability to “store” CO2–such as depleted oil and gas fields.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has emphasised that it is not possible to ‘limit likely warming to below 2°C if bioenergy, CCS, and their combination (BECCS) are limited’, while the International Energy Agency has stated that ‘CCS must be part of a ‘strengthened global climate response’. Even if one does not consider the energy sector, CCS is almost the only way to reduce CO2 from the cement and steel industries. Nonetheless, CCS is a controversial technology. There is notable opposition to and different perceptions of the technology among stakeholders and we also know that the reaction of the public to CCS will considerably affect the development of the technology in democratic countries. Therefore, it is important to understand these diverse perceptions and their roots.

Photo by Thomas Hafeneth on Unsplash

In our research, we looked at this controversial technology from a cross-cultural perspective. Previous research has identified general and local mechanisms in how the general public reacts to CCS and researchers have also noticed that there are differences between countries, but the effects of cross-cultural differences had not previously been explored in detail. In our study, which was recently published in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, we argue that it is crucial to understand how public perceptions of a particular technology emerge and form in their individual contexts or how perceptions are embedded in large-scale cultural frameworks.

Our results show that the effects of individual level variables such as familiarity with technology, or sociodemographic variables such as education, are important, but their effects are likely mediated and confounded by the cultural setting. We found that in parallel with other factors such as trust, cultural dimensions such as uncertainty avoidance and the society’s short-term or long-term orientation affect risk perception. Uncertainty avoidance can be described as the extent to which members of a society feel uncomfortable with uncertain, unknown, ambiguous, or unstructured situations. Long-term orientation on the other hand, refers to a society that fosters virtues and is oriented towards future rewards, in particular perseverance and thrift.

High uncertainty avoidance, for instance, leads to higher risk perception because among nations with a strong uncertainty avoidance index, there is a mentality of “what is different is dangerous”. Moreover, countries that demonstrate a long-term orientation might express a higher level of risk perception concerning the technology because people from these countries place more value on thrift, which implies being more careful about investing in risky or uncertain matters. In addition, investment in real estate is a notable feature of such societies, and this is closely tied to the issue of NIMBY­ – an acronym for the phrase “not in my back yard”, denoting opposition by residents to a proposed development in their area – which is one of the most important controversies related to CCS. For example, Germany has a very high long-term orientation, so Germans have serious concerns about the effect of CCS on the real estate market and about having CCS facilities in their region.

All in all, our work provides a framework to understand why and how societies challenge the technology. Cultural differences and lack of consideration for them have in the past caused the failure of negotiations or implementation of some projects. Our study is a contribution to the field and could be used to understand how cross-cultural differences operate in the realm of sustainable energy technology.

Reference:

Karimi F and Toikka A (2018). General public reactions to carbon capture and storage: Does culture matter? International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control 70:193-201

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.

Science without policy is science, but policy without science is gambling

By Géza Tóth, Sustainability Manager Tropical Oils, SBU Ferrero and IIASA alumnus

This famous sentence providing the catchy title for my blog and inspiration throughout my professional career comes from David Grey, who was one of my great mentors at IIASA.

During my seven years at the institute, I had the opportunity to work with several research programs where I had to find my way in various disciplines. Even though I was not the typical modeler, I was fortunate to work with patient tutors and great leaders who were supporting my development and triggering constructive thoughts. I was eager to learn about the crosscutting nature of global challenges and transversal opportunities. As a natural consequence, I found myself migrating between many IIASA programs and roles, constantly on the lookout for new challenges.

I completed a multidisciplinary PhD alongside my regular work at IIASA and changed titles and topics several times. I was into regional development and sustainability dynamics of post-war geographies where you cannot omit any influencing factors, whether it be political, environmental, or socioeconomic in nature. As I look back, I believe my overall results would not be complete without the flexibility and inclusiveness that I had the privilege of experiencing at IIASA.

When I moved into the food industry, I realized that everything I had learnt at IIASA, especially the systems thinking, come in handy when tackling the complex sustainability problems the industry faces. I have always liked connecting dots and fostering collaboration. While it is difficult to pitch policy-relevant research results, I believe there is a clear business case in bringing science and industry closer together.

© Nolimit46 | Dreamstime.com

Our global food supply chains are increasingly untraceable and so we have to connect a multitude of dots. Yet, industry is a very complex animal, driven by powerful shareholder corporations with a clear business agenda. IIASA can predict futures of our declining resources, influencing social aspects, even costs and required investments of businesses. Nevertheless, transforming industry does not depend on scientific facts and publications alone. What we need is to be able to translate scientific findings into innovations that will break current business rules or even disrupt them.

I feel that one of the biggest challenges of industry is to hear and understand the voice of science. Trading is a straightforward business where sustainability can be managed by compliance. As part of my responsibility of managing palm oil supply chain sustainability at Ferrero, I learned that in consumer goods manufacturing, consumers are the main drivers for Corporate Social Responsibility actions and their behavior and consumption patterns are changing.

Severe environmental destruction and unethical labor issues heavily affect the palm oil sector. The production and trade of agricultural commodities follow the rapidly increasing demand for food but, ironically, the amount of food waste and number of hungry people is also tipping. While European policymakers send contradicting messages about whether to eat palm oil or burn it in car engines, the destruction of ancient forests has reached unprecedented levels. Time is of the essence and science must have its voice heard in the language of industry, politicians and consumers. We cannot afford to work in silos. It is time to collaborate and finally link science with people.

The IIASA Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) is a unique platform and I am convinced that the positive impact it creates is enormous. Although I was never officially part of the YSSP, I interacted with the participants every year and felt like one of them. Highly skilled young thinkers come together from all around the world, influence and learn from each other under IIASA mentorship and are bound to end up in various disciplines and roles out there. They will surely know how to translate applied science into the right language and channel.

As a family-owned global company, Ferrero is one of the few businesses that is able to make long-term systematic plans and has a successful history of working with a forward looking and constructive vision. Its potential to be a lighthouse model for the industry is enormous and thus its responsibility too. It should therefore come as no surprise that supporting the YSSP program was a natural first step in Ferrero’s collaboration with IIASA.

It is not easy to explain what IIASA does and how it is relevant for the industry. It is equally difficult to illustrate it with good examples. IIASA scientists have however been helping me a lot to identify appropriate channels. I hope there will be more outputs from IIASA in the future that translate science into the business case allowing us in the industry sector to connect more dots.

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.