Risk and Vulnerability Program (RAV)

The long-term aim of the IIASA Program on Risk and Vulnerability (RAV) is to contribute to decreasing the risk and vulnerability of societies and ecosystems, and promote their adaptation and resilience, to stresses imposed or aggravated by global change phenomena. RAV has three research groups.

The first, Disasters and Development, is investigating ways for helping households, businesses and governments better adapt to climate-related and other extreme events by carrying out studies that characterize risk, vulnerability and adaptive capacity. A special interest is financial risk management with insurance and risk-sharing mechanisms.

The Decisions and Governance group investigates how the presence of risk and uncertainty influences the design of successful policies in the areas of environmental management and climate change policy and decision making.

The Water and Resilience group has organized stakeholder-driven dialogues to elicit local knowledge and form the basis for conceptual and formal models of factors related to the vulnerability, resilience and adaptive capacity of the social-ecological systems in selected river basins.

Applicants are encouraged to contact the program representative, Jan Sendzimir (sendzim@iiasa.ac.at) for any scientific related questions. For more information about the RAV program check the web site.

Responsible for this page: Tanja Huber
Last updated: 03 Oct 2011