Mar 12, 2014 | IIASA Network, Science and Policy
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network is an expert on economics, development, and sustainability, and a founding member of IIASA and European Forum Alpbach’s Global Think Tank, which is holding its first meeting in Laxenburg this week.
On Wednesday, 12 March Sachs will give a public lecture on the topic at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
Jeff Sachs speaks at the Alpbach Forum in 2013. Photo Credit: European Forum Alpbach
IIASA: Your work spans a large area of research: from economics, to Earth science, to sustainable development. What is the common thread that ties all this together?
JS: The common thread is the challenge that we face on the planet. We can no longer separate economic, environment, and social challenges because we find that if we try to pursue any one of those alone, we end up jeopardizing the others.
For too long, economists have focused simply on economic growth, and clearly that strategy by now has put Earth and humanity at great peril. There’s no shortcut anymore. We have to be able to combine a vision that includes all the major dimensions of the complicated global reality that we face. Economics, divided societies, environmental crises, and rapidly changing geopolitics. It’s not simple to integrate all of these different areas. Our traditional intellectual disciplines do not accomplish that.
IIASA has been one of the world’s leading champions of this kind of integrated vision. Systems thinking applied to massive human problems, bringing together very diverse areas of natural science, social science, and I would say ethical considerations as well. This kind of holistic approach is central to IIASA’s whole strategy. That’s one of the reasons I’m so proud of my connection to the Institute.
What do you see as the biggest problems facing our planet?
We have become an enormously crowded and interconnected global society overnight, because of the technological reach of our economies and because of the remarkable growth of the world’s population during the last century. With 7.2 billion people on the planet now, we are putting vast parts of the biosphere and human well-being at dire risk. We are only slowly waking up to this reality.
All of history, humans have faced local challenges, but we have never faced such a confluence of massive global challenges at the same time. We don’t yet have the institutions, the insight, or the moral outlook to handle this set of challenges, and yet they are bearing down on us very fast.
In your lecture you’ll argue that it is realistic to think we could solve many of these challenges, for example, ending extreme poverty. What would need to be done to accomplish that goal, and why do you think it can be done?
When one thinks about the challenge of ending poverty you quickly realize that while the challenge is great, we also have unique positive opportunities. With the revolutions in communications technology, communities that until five years ago were isolated, impoverished, and with little prospect of escaping from poverty are now connected to global information, as well as to local markets and health clinics. Schoolchildren can get access to the world of information online. Finance has come to rural areas through mobile banking. All of these are examples of the kinds of breakthroughs that are now possible in addressing what have been extraordinarily tough problems of poverty.
We also see the poverty rate coming down now at an unprecedented speed, even in some of the poorest places on the planet. Major advances have been achieved in East Asia during the past quarter century, and increasingly, Africa too is now finally turning the corner on extreme poverty. I have argued that we could mobilize technologies and use directed investments in public health, education, infrastructure, and agriculture to make a decisive breakthrough within our generation.
In my book, “The End of Poverty,” I said that by 2025 we could end extreme poverty. I am afraid that the date is slipping a little because of the lack of concerted effort, but it’s notable for me and gratifying that the World Bank this past year adopted formally the goal of ending extreme poverty by the year 2030. And I believe that the United Nations member states will also adopt such a goal next year when they create the new Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs.
There are two huge risks that could absolutely defeat this possibility. One is the still greatly excessive population growth in some of the world’s poorest countries. The second is climate change, which left out of control will devastate large parts of the world including regions where many of the world’s poorest people live, for instance the arid regions of the world.
What about climate change? Do you think it’s really possible, at this point, to limit climate change to the internationally agreed target of 2 degrees?
I believe that we are at the very last chance to reach that goal. We have cliff ahead of us, with a sign that says, “Do not go beyond this point.” This point is the 2 degrees centigrade limit. We know from all the physical evidence and all the economic trends that we’re just within a hair’s width of exhausting the possibility of meeting that goal. And I worry that if we fail to achieve that goal we are going to slide very far and very fast down the mountainside, as it were. The world is negotiating a climate agreement in Paris in December 2015, and I believe that’s the very last chance to achieve the 2 degree centigrade goal.
I am not especially optimistic, but I don’t think that all is lost yet. Much depends on a much greater seriousness in the next year and ten months than we have shown in the last 22 years since the climate treaty was adopted.
Your lecture is entitled “The Age of Sustainable Development” what do you mean by that term? Why is now the time to be thinking about these topics?
I argue that we have entered an era when the concept of sustainable development has become the necessary concept for our time. When I say sustainable development, I mean on the analytical side the integrated vision of economic, social, and environmental dynamics; and on the normative side the shared goals of economic prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability. I believe that we have a reasonable chance that this will be formally recognized by the UN member states in 2015, when they formally adopt the new Sustainable Development Goals.
My talk in Vienna is about why the concept of sustainable development is so important, and what it means. It’s not a household phrase, and I think there is a tremendous amount of public education that will be needed to understand what the opportunities are and what the threats that we face in this generation are. My basic point is that every generation faces its distinct challenges and sustainable development is our distinct challenge.
What do you see as the role for researchers and for institutions like IIASA in solving these global challenges?
I believe that these problems are inherently complex because they are about managing interconnected complex systems. There’s nothing simple about the world economy, nothing simple about global social dynamics, and nothing simple about interconnected Earth systems. And yet we have to master the risks that attend to each of those and the interconnections among them. It’s quite obvious in that regard that IIASA has a unique role to play. IIASA has been in the forefront of climate modeling, demographic modeling, and agricultural modeling for many years. I’ve been a huge admirer of the Institute’s work, and I look forward to working more closely with IIASA in the future.
I’ve been tasked by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with helping to organize a global network of problem solving on sustainable development. This initiative is called the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). IIASA will be a very important member and I would say leader of that effort, and IIASA’s Director General, Pavel Kabat, is a member of the leadership council of the SDSN. We have already begun to strategize on this with Pavel Kabat, IIASA Deputy Director General Nebojsa Nakicenovic, and many of IIASA’s world class researchers. There’s a tremendous timely opportunity to work with governments around the world and work with the United Nations to help identify safe pathways ahead.
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 27, 2014 | Demography, Science and Policy
By Erich Striessnig, IIASA World Population Program
Is replacement level fertility really the best for society? Maybe not, say IIASA researchers. Photo Credit: Héctor Gómez Herrero via Flickr (Creative Commons License)
When asked what a desirable fertility level for populations might be, most politicians, journalists, and even social scientists would say it is around two children per woman, as this would – on the long run – prevent a population from either exploding or dying out. Other reasons for championing replacement level fertility include maintaining the size of the labor force and stabilizing the dependency ratio. But what is the evidence for this rule of thumb?
My colleague Wolfgang Lutz and I aimed to answer this question in a new study published in the journal Demographic Research. We found, not surprisingly, that the optimal fertility level strongly depends on what you mean by optimal.
The criteria for optimal fertility have often been motivated by nationalistic desires for larger and thus more powerful nations. Today our concerns run more towards the dangers of overpopulation for the environment, the climate, and the limited resources on Earth, dampening the enthusiasm for high fertility rates. But as fertility rates fall in many countries around the world, there is a growing concern about aging populations and an increasing number of elderly depending on an ever smaller number of people actively participating in the labor force.
While all of these fears relate to the same problem – an unbalanced population age-structure – the resulting assessments of what level of fertility would be desirable completely ignore the heterogeneity of the population with regard to important demographic characteristics, especially the population’s education structure.
In our study, we wanted to account for the fact that more education not only has higher economic costs, including later entry to the labor market and higher life expectancy, which can hardly been seen as a negative effect. But education also leads to higher productivity, less unemployment, and a healthier workforce that would on average retire later. To include these factors in our assessment, we ran thousands of simulations using varying constant rates of fertility.
What we found is that when we factor in education, the level of fertility that on the long run would lead to the lowest level of dependency is well below the supposedly magical level of two children per woman.
We also tried to link the effects of different fertility rates to the resulting environmental burden by factoring in expected carbon emissions. Not surprisingly, higher rates of fertility lead to faster population growth and more emissions. That suggests that an environmentally aware society should aim for even lower fertility levels.
While our research is not intended to prescribe fertility levels for individuals and countries, the conclusions drawn from this thought experiment suggest that the widespread popular notions that current fertility levels–for example in France or the US are just right because they are around replacement level, whereas they are too low in countries like Germany or Austria–may be wrong. According to our new study, the opposite is true.
Reference
Striessnig, E, Lutz W. (2014) How does education change the relationship between fertility and age-dependency under environmental constraints? A long-term simulation exercise Demographic Research, 30(16):465-492 http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/16/
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.
Jan 28, 2014 | Risk and resilience
Interview with IIASA risk expert Nadejda Komendantova
In a new study, IIASA Risk, Policy, and Vulnerability Program researcher Nadejda Komendantova and colleagues from Germany and Switzerland examined how natural hazards and risks assessments can be incorporated into decision-making processes in Europe on mitigation of multiple risks.
A cyclist rides along the flooded Danube River in Braila, Romania, in 2010. Credit: cod_gabriel on Flickr
Why did you decide to conduct this study?
European decision makers currently have a number of methods that they can use to assess natural hazards and risks and apply to the decision-making process. These methods include risk and hazard assessments, probabilistic scenarios, and socio-economic and engineering models. The variety of tools is enormous and volume of knowledge and data is growing. However, the process of communication between science and practice leaves a lot of open questions for research.
Researchers have developed a few tools to provide multiple risk assessment of a given territory. But even though these models have been tested by operational and practicing stakeholders, there is limited information about how useful the models are for civil protection stakeholders to use in practice. In order to communicate results from science to practice and make it possible for decision-makers to use such tools, it helps to involve decision-makers in the development process. Participatory modeling, which is an important part of risk governance, allows us to not only to take into consideration the facts, but also values and judgments that decision-makers bring to their actions.
What questions did you aim to answer in your study?
The decision-making process becomes even more complex when we talk about situations with multiple risks – multi-risks – which involve interactions between several risks. How will decision-maker will prioritize their actions on risk mitigation or on resources allocation when facing not single but multiple risks? We also wanted to find out if the tools developed by science such as decision support models could be suitable for these tasks. Another question is if there are differences in perceptions of the usability of decision-support tools between different stakeholders, such as academia (based on more theoretical considerations) and civil protection (based on practice).
What are the multiple risks or hazards that face Europe?
Across Europe, people suffer losses not just from single hazards, but also from multiple events in combination. The most important hazards for Europe are earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, wildfires, winter storms, and floods along both rivers and coastlines.
What methods did you use to conduct your study?
To answer our research questions we collected feedback from civil protection stakeholders on existing risk and hazard assessment tools as well as on the generic multi-risk framework to understand interrelations between different risks, such as conjoint and cascade effects. The new study was based on a method developed by Arnaud Mignan at ETH Zürich, with a decision-support tool developed by Bijan Khazai at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Through a participatory approach, the decision-support tool allowed stakeholders to assign relative importance to the losses for different sectors for each of the scenarios likely to occur in the region.
We collected data through questionnaires on existing risk assessment tools in Europe and their implementation. Then, using the new framework, we conducted focus group discussions in Bonn and Lisbon, and decision-making experiments applying the developed tools. Afterwards we had a chance to collect feedback from stakeholders.
What did you find?
The study showed that general standards for multi-risk assessment are still missing—there are different terminologies and different methodologies related to data collection, monitoring, and output. According to stakeholders from practice, this variety of data, assessment methods, tools and terminology might be a barrier for implementation of the multi-risk approach.
The study also found a sharp divide in understanding of the usability of the tools and areas for their application. Academic stakeholders saw the risk-assessment tools as being useful to understand loss and communication of multi-risk parameters. The stakeholders from practice instead saw the tool as more useful for training and educational purposes as well as to raise awareness about possible multi-risk scenarios.
What should be done to help decision-makers make better decisions?
The study made it clear that we need to work on training and education, both for policymakers and the public. The models we have developed could be useful for educating stakeholders about the usefulness of a multi-risk approach, and to disseminate these results to the general public. It was recommended to use the tools during special training workshops organized for decision-makers on multi-risk mitigation to see possible consequences of a multi-hazard situation for their region. Participatory modeling, involving cooperation between scientists and decision-makers from practice, could not only improve communication processes between science and policy. In addition, decision-support models can become a part of dialogue to help to avoid judgment biases and systematic errors in decision-making and to help in complex decision-making process grounded on human rationality and judgment biases.
Reference:
Nadejda Komendantova, Roger Mrzyglocki, Arnaud Mignan, Bijan Khazai, Friedemann Wenzel, Anthony Patt, Kevin Fleming. 2014. Multi-hazard and multi-risk decision support tools as a part of participatory risk governance: Feedback from civil protection stakeholder. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221242091300068X
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.
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