Global Terrestrial Ecosystems
IIASA’s Forestry Program (FOR) addresses multiple key challenges: management of global terrestrial ecosystems (including the forest sector) and interactions with other sectors in the context of global change: specifically climate change, deforestation, food security, land use competition, bioenergy and others; and how to enable terrestrial ecosystems to positively contribute to socioeconomic development. These objectives are addressed under broad Research Themes:

Global Terrestrial Ecosystems: research into the exchange of GHGs between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere both globally and regionally, accounting for uncertainties. Options such as mitigation, adaptation, avoided deforestation and bioenergy are explored

Emerging Economies & Governance : China, India, Brazil, Congo Basin, and the Koreas... bringing FOR research results into the sector’s policy and governance processes

The Global Land-Use Modeling and Environmental Economics Group applies cross-cutting science for specific policy oriented results

Research, News & Events
A IIASA analysis (involving FOR researchers) of the effects of climate change and abatement policies on the value of natural resources in Northern Europe and the Arctic Sea area was presented to the Finnish Prime Minister’s Economic Council during recent considerations of Finland’s Arctic Strategy.

A new model developed by IIASA’s Oskar Franklin and partners in MICDIF demonstrates how microbes, such as bacteria, adjust their composition to maximize their growth, which may influence large scale nutrient cycling in ecosystems.

Michael Obersteiner participated in multiple Side Events at COP16 in Mexico. In one such event, IIASA and the Global Energy Assessment described the multiple co-benefits of integrating climate and energy policies more

The need for policy-oriented solutions on uncertainty related to greenhouse gas emission inventories is addressed in a special issue of Climatic Change, lead-edited by Matthias Jonas

Research co-authored by Junguo Liu and Michael Obersteiner published in PNAS, indicates that globally, two-fifths of nitrogen used in agriculture is lost to ecosystems

Michael Obersteiner in Nature News

An article in Science co-authored by Petr Havlik and Michael Obersteiner, explains that accounting rules in the Kyoto Protocol treat all bioenergy as carbon neutral, regardless of the biomass source, which may cause large differences in net emissions