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.
Nov 20, 2013 | Citizen Science, Environment, Food & Water
By Linda See, Research Scholar, IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program
Researchers estimate we spend 3 billion hours a week on game playing. CC Image courtesy TheErin on Flickr
On a recent rush hour train ride in London I looked around to see just about everybody absorbed in their mobile phone or tablet. This in itself is not that unusual. But when I snooped over a few shoulders, what really surprised me was that most of those people were playing games. I hope this bodes well for our new game, Cropland Capture, introduced last week.
Cropland Capture is a game version of our citizen science project Geo-Wiki, which has a growing network of interested experts and volunteers who regularly help us in validating land cover through our competitions. By turning the idea into a game, we hope to reach a much wider audience.
Playing Cropland Capture is simple: look at a satellite image and tell us if you see any evidence of cropland. This will help us build a better map of where cropland is globally, something that is surprisingly uncertain at the moment. This sort of data is crucial for global food security, identifying where the big gaps in crop yields are, and monitoring crops affected by droughts, amongst many other applications.
Gamification and citizen science
The idea of Cropland Capture is not entirely unique. There are an astonishingly large number of games available for high tech gaming consoles, PCs and increasingly, mobile devices. While the majority of these games are pure entertainment, some are part of an emerging genre known as ”serious games” or ”games with a purpose.” These are games that either have an educational element or through the process of playing them, you can help scientists in doing their research. One of the most successful examples is the game FoldIt, where teams of players work together to decode protein structures. This is not an easy task for a computer to do, but some people are exceptionally talented at seeing these patterns. The result has even led to new scientific discoveries that have been published in high level journals such as Nature.
Jane McGonigal, in her book Reality is Broken (Why Games Make us Better and How They Can Change the World), estimates that we spend 3 billion hours a week alone on game playing, and that the average young person spends more time gaming by the end of their school career than they have actually spent in school. Although these figures may seem alarming, McGonigal argues that there are many positive benefits associated with gaming, including the development of problem-solving skills, the ability to cope better with problems such as depression or chronic pain, and even the possibility that we might live ten years longer if we played games. If people spent just a fraction of this time on “serious games” like FoldIt and Cropland Capture, imagine how much could be achieved.
Since the game started last Friday, 185 players have validated 119,777 square kilometers of land (more than twice the land area of Denmark).
Cropland Capture is easy to play – simply swipe the picture left or right to say whether there is cropland or not.
Get in the game
You can play Cropland Capture on a tablet (iPad or Android) or mobile phone (iPhone or Android). Download the game from the Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store. For those who prefer an online version, you can also play the game at: http://www.geo-wiki.org/games/croplandcapture/. For more information about the game, check out our videos at: http://www.geo-wiki.org/games/instructions-videos/. During the next six months, we will be providing regular updates on Twitter (@CropCapture) and Facebook.
The game is being played for six months, where the top scorer each week will be crowned the weekly winner. The 25 weekly winners will then be entered into a draw at the end of the competition to win three big prizes: an Amazon Kindle, a smartphone, and a tablet. The game was launched only last week so there is plenty of time to get involved and help scientific research.
Oct 29, 2013 | Energy & Climate, Science and Policy
This post was originally published on the recharge.green blog. IIASA is a partner in the new project, which focuses on the potential for renewable energy in the Alps.
When I think of an alpine forest, I think of the towering cedar trees that blanket the Cascade mountains near my native Seattle, with trunks so broad you can’t reach your arms around them. I think of the shadowy quiet that envelops me as I wander through a mountain forest in my new home in Austria. I think of the scent of pine needles and the bounce of my feet on a trail softened by forest litter. The value of a mature forest to people like me who love the outdoors—its recreational value—is impossible to put into numbers.
We can, however, calculate the effects of different styles of forest management on more quantifiable criteria. We can determine how much carbon dioxide is taken up from the atmosphere and stored by long-growing forests. And we can estimate how much bioenergy we can sustainably produce by managing forests for biomass harvesting.
This is exactly what IIASA scientists have done for their first efforts in the recharge.green project. IIASA’s role in the project is to use our modeling expertise to explore the various possibilities for renewable energy expansion in the Alps. We are also looking at the tradeoffs and benefits of the different possible scenarios and ecosystem services (ESS). As a first step, researchers Florian Kraxner, Sylvain Leduc , Sabine Fuss (now with MCC Berlin), Nicklas Forsell, and Georg Kindermann used the IIASA BeWhere and Global Forest (G4M) models look at the tradeoffs between bioenergy production or carbon storage in alpine forests.
These graphs show the first results for recharge.green from IIASA’s BeWhere and G4M models, optimizing the location of bioenergy plants to maximize either carbon sequestration (top) or bioenergy production (bottom). The gradiant of green colors shows the amount of carbon storage over the landscape, while the red boxes (and according gradient in red) show the harvesting intensity in different harvesting areas.
“Managing forests optimally for bioenergy requires more intensive management,” says Kraxner. That means shorter rotations where trees are cut more often. Such a forest is made up of smaller trees that may look more like “close-to-nature plantations” than an old-growth forest. In contrast, managing forests for carbon storage means letting the trees grow older, also good for biodiversity and environmental preservation.
In their analysis, Kraxner and the team compared two management strategies: restricting bioenergy production to a small land area, and managing it intensively, or spreading bioenergy over a large land area but managing less intensively over the whole area. They found that the same amount of bioenergy could be produced by managing a small amount of land area intensively for bioenergy production. This more intensive management on a small area of land would free up a larger land area for preservation and protection or other special dedication to ecosystem services.
“Both methods are sustainable,” says Kraxner, “but the optics are different. Intensification can be a good solution to provide renewable energy and at the same time preserve biodiversity and the more intangible values of mature forests.”
What do you think? What should our priorities be in managing Alpine forests?
Oct 1, 2013 | Alumni, Poverty & Equity, Young Scientists
Pheakkdey Nguon, participant in IIASA’s 2012 Young Scientists Summer Program, and IIASA Annual Fund recipient, has won an IPCC reserach fellowship to fund his research on REDD+ in Cambodia. In this interview he discusses his research plans, the award, and his experience at IIASA.
Pheakkdey Nguon at the awards ceremony for the IPCC research fellowship on 30 September, 2013.
Nexus: Please tell us about the research that you will be working on under this grant: What is the major question that you’re studying?
Pheakkdey Nguon: The main objective of my dissertation research is to better understand how governance systems organize and distribute knowledge on the UN’s REDD+ Program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) across different groups of stakeholders with conflicting interests, and the resulting impacts of such systems on forests and people in Cambodia. I am basically asking to what extent the different groups of stakeholders in Cambodia have considered REDD+ as salient, credible and/or legitimate for addressing deforestation, forest degradation and sustainable livelihood development.
How will you address this question?
Theoretically, I am drawing from sustainability science and political economy of institutions and decisions literature to reveal ways in which perceptions, institutional locations, and contextual differences affect patterns of stakeholders’ engagement in REDD+, a complex environmental governance project that spans multiple levels of implementation and involve various groups of stakeholders. Methodologically, I am using qualitative methods such as key informant interviews (up to 150 interviews), observations of REDD+ policy processes (up to 70 observations), and extended archival research (e.g. government reports, newspapers, policy briefs, feasibility studies) to answer my question.
The interviews offer a first-hand account of the criteria that different group of stakeholders use and their justifications for using those criteria to assess REDD+ projects within their project areas and in Cambodia. Observations of REDD+ policy processes (e.g. meetings, workshops, consultations) provide information on the participation and engagement of different groups of stakeholders in the production, examination and dissemination of knowledge on REDD+ within the three project sites and in Cambodia. Finally, archival research is conducted for two main reasons: (1) to validate, compare, and contextualize information gathered through interviews and policy observations; and (2) to add to the study information that would not be appropriate or feasible to collect through interviews or observations, either because of the political sensitivities of the topics or time constraints.
Why are you interested in this area?
Academic and policy-oriented literature on REDD+ has been prolific within the last decade. Its central focus has been on addressing the technical issues – defined largely by the scientific and policy communities – that will improve the design and implementation of REDD+ so that its outcomes achieve the goals of effectiveness, efficiency and equity (the so-called “3Es” criteria). Whether these “3Es” criteria – or the underlying logic of REDD+ in general – are as relevant for the different groups of stakeholders in developing countries as they are for the international policy community has, however, been insufficiently substantiated in the literature. Therefore, my justification for exploring the abovementioned question departs from my assumption that the preferences and perceptions of stakeholders cannot be presumed to coincide with aspirations of scientists and/ or policy-makers who have been working on REDD+. Understanding how stakeholders interpret, experience and assess REDD+ is central to understanding the appropriateness of REDD+ as an initiative aiming at addressing deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries.
How does it relate to the work you did at IIASA?
I classify myself as a sustainability science geographer, and so I came to IIASA already very inspired because people who have had tremendous intellectual influence on me have at certain points been affiliated with IIASA, for example Robert Kates and William Clark. The main activity that I was doing during my YSSP participation was trying to translate literature from these intellectuals into testable hypotheses that will help me understand the question(s) I am asking in my dissertation research. This was not an easy process. It involved a lot of conversations between me, my advisor at Clark (Dr. Anthony Bebbington) and my advisor at IIASA (Dr. Hannes Böttcher). I would also like to acknowledge the very engaging and informative conversations that I had with Dr. Anthony Patt, Dr. Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer, Dr. Michael Thompson, and fellow YSSPers on this matter. They were very generous with their time.
How did the YSSP help you to get this grant?
I came to the YSSP with the main intention of finalizing the questions that I will pursue for my dissertation research. My goal was to have a defensible dissertation research proposal by the time I return to my PhD program at Clark University. I was also hoping that I would be able to build on this proposal to apply for research grants to pursue my empirical fieldwork in Cambodia. During the YSSP, I was very fortunate to be able to work very closely with Dr. Hannes Böttcher, from the Ecosystem Services and Management Program. Similar to other PhD students, I had so many questions that were floating in my head, some of which did not make any sense now that I am reflecting on them. Therefore, I very much admired Dr. Böttcher for his patience, supports and willingness to engage with all the ideas that I was coming up with. Through these many conversations, I did finish my dissertation research proposal that I defended at Clark. And this is the very same proposal that helped me get the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) research award. Additionally, I was also able to get one of my dissertation papers accepted for publication at Environmental Science and Policy (DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2013.04.011) during my time at IIASA.
Why is this research important?
I hope that my research will have some impact in the academy and in the realm of forest governance and climate change debates based in a developing country context. In academe, my research engages with politically broader discussions on the science-policy interface, market-based approaches to forest governance in developing countries, stakeholders’ assessments of policies on climate change, and national sovereignty issues. Beyond the academy, this research is relevant to the ongoing debate on how scientific knowledge is being received, perceived and reconfigured in environmental governance policy that spans multiple scales of implementation and involves various groups of stakeholders. Finally, significant for the national and international policy negotiations on REDD+, this study should contribute to the debate on why certain groups of stakeholders have been supportive, while others have been critical, of the implementation of REDD+ projects in developing countries.
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.
Sep 30, 2013 | Systems Analysis
By Jennifer Chan, participant in the IIASA co-led IFA Summer School
From 9 to 13 September in Laxenburg, Austria a group of researchers and practitioners gathered for the International Foresight Academy Summer School program organized by the Austrian Institute of Technology and IIASA’s Advanced Systems Analysis program. It was 5 days of converging minds, cultures and comfort zones. We were a group of strong perspectives, to say the least, and so you can imagine how some of the conversations transpired. In a small town outside of Vienna, we had the luxury of being away from our day-to-day to learn about foresight and engagement in stakeholder consultation. The two instructors, Felicity Edwards and Ruben Nelson, from Canmore, Alberta, are both seasoned veterans and brought a wealth of information and experience to the week.
Foresight refers to looking forward to anticipate the future landscape and design scenarios to test and evaluate where solutions will demonstrate the greatest impact.
I was drawn to travel across the world to be connected to a spectrum of diverse perspectives and gain insight to how researchers and practitioners are approaching foresight and engagement. It was a pleasure to see how people from around the world approach the complex problems of the world and spend the time to improve their craft. As a Master of Design Student, Strategic Foresight and Innovation at the Ontario College of Art and Design, I was specifically excited to be working and learning from professional foresighters and consultants working at the intersection of foresight and engagement. While my work is more in engagement, I am always looking for more tools to diversify my approaches to research and to designing community consultation.
Ideas from an exercise during the IFA summer school.
Together, we discussed and worked through complex topics of language, terminology and diverse cultures from a spectrum of working styles and comfort levels with foresight and engagement. I strongly think that the most powerful take away from the IFA is that we are all working on the wicked problems of the world in different ways and if we can simple push each other a little bit than we have done more than we could have on our own.
Participants in the 2013 IFA Summer School
I left the International Foresight Academy with a thirst to learn more about how foresight can impact my work – I am the Founder of Exhibit Change, a design driven community engagement organization with a focus on the intersection of wicked problems and citizen designers. We work with community and stakeholders to identify pain points and work together to co-design the spaces that support systemic change and shifts in behavior. Working in teams, with the guidance of Felicity and Ruben made it clear that engagement and foresight are closely aligned and that the spectrum of tools is expanding and influencing each discipline. I learned a lot from the content, the facilitation methods and time to reflect on my own practices.
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.
Biography:
Jennifer Chan is a design strategist and social entrepreneur. Her interests are city building, education, design thinking, participatory leadership, and social impact. Jennifer has a Bachelors of Architectural Science and is currently a candidate for the Masters of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Jennifer’s work and research has her looking at educational design, spatial pedagogy experiential design, game theory, civic engagement; generally creating spaces for individuals to co-design experiences for public good. Jennifer is the Founder of Exhibit Change, a design-driven community engagement organization exploring the intersections of wicked problems and citizen designers. Jennifer is constantly asking “How Might We…”
You must be logged in to post a comment.