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IIASA Staff, Collaborator, Visitor and YSSP Information
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 | Fischer, Günther | | 292 | s159 | LUC/GGI |
Günther Fischer leads the Land Use Change and Agriculture (LUC) Program at IIASA, which is focusing research on global climate change impacts and adaptation, on regional analyses to support decision-making for sustainable and efficient use of land and water resources, and on development of related methodologies and novel analytical tools.
With an education in mathematics, his main fields of research are mathematical modeling of ecological-economic systems, econometrics, optimization, applied multi-criteria decision analysis, integrated systems and policy analysis, spatial agro-ecosystems modeling, and climate change impacts and adaptation.
Günther Fischer joined IIASA's Computer Sciences Group in November 1974. From 1977 to 1985 he was affiliated with IIASA's Food and Agriculture Program (FAP) as a Research Scholar. He participated in the formulation of a general equilibrium framework and the implementation and application of a global model of the world food systems, known as IIASA's Basic Linked System. He was a key contributor to several major food and agricultural studies: On welfare implications of trade liberalization in agriculture; on poverty and hunger; and on climate change and world agriculture.
In 1993 he became a member of the IGBP-IHDP Core Project Planning Committee on Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LUCC) and for several years served on the Scientific Committee of the joint LUCC Core Project/Programme of the IGBP-IHDP.
Günther Fischer has collaborated with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on the development, implementation and application of FAO's Agro-ecological Zones (AEZ) methodology to national and regional resource appraisals. He has contributed to major FAO agricultural perspective studies (published in 1995 and 2003), and was a co-author of several reports and CD-ROM products jointly published with the FAO, notably a comprehensive assessment of the world's agricultural ecology published in 2002.
In 2002, he led a special study commissioned by the United Nations for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg assessing ecological-economic impacts of Climate Change and Agricultural Vulnerability. Recently, he contributed to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment as a lead author on food systems responses.
Complementing his global research activities, Günther Fischer has been conducting and initiating in recent years a number of regional LUC studies for policy support: e.g., in Europe on issues related to sustainability of land use, and on potentials, challenges and trade-offs of bio-fuel production and use; in Ukraine on agriculture and rural transformation in transition economies; in China on sustainable agricultural development and food security, with a current focus on water scarcity and agro-environmental impacts in the context of rapid growth, globalization and global change.
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