United States of America
The original and present National Member Organization is the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a private, nonprofit organization created by congressional charter to provide expert advice on the most pressing challenges facing the nation and the world. The responsibilities of IIASA membership are handled by the U.S. Committee for IIASA, an NAS-appointed body of leaders from the U.S. science and policy communities who have expertise and interest in IIASA’s areas of research and their policy implications. The Chairman of the U.S. NMO Committee for IIASA, and Vice-Chair of the IIASA governing Council, is Dr. Simon Levin, Moffett Professor of Biology at Princeton University.
Kathie Bailey-Mathae, Director of the Board on International Scientific Organizations (BISO) of the NAS/National Research Council, is NMO Secretary for the US Committee for IIASA.
Three of IIASA’s 17-member Science Advisory Committee are Americans: Professor Ralph L. Keeney, the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University; Dr. Jerry M. Melillo, the Ecosystems Center, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts; and Professor Fred Roberts, Director, Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, Rutgers University.
Key Relationships and Collaborations
IIASA has, throughout its history, collaborated and cooperated with scientists and policy makers throughout the USA, and IIASA scientists work with their American colleagues on numerous international initiatives such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The following list includes a few of IIASA’s key institutional relationships in the U.S., in and out of government.
• U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): US membership in IIASA is a matter of U.S. government policy, set and periodically reviewed by the White House OSTP.
• U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF): NSF is the funding agency for the U.S. membership payment to IIASA as well as for the US NMO. NSF works closely with the NAS to strengthen links between IIASA and Federal agencies.
• U.S. Department of Energy (DOE): DOE has a long history of cooperation with the IIASA Energy Program.
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: The US EPA cooperates with and funds IIASA’s Mitigation of Air Pollutants and Greenhouse Gases (MAG) Program, particularly on Arctic issues.
• NASA: IIASA’s Ecosystems Services and Management Program has been a key partner with NASA in international cooperation on Ukraine forests.
• Stanford University: Stanford’s Energy Modeling Forum has a long history of cooperation with the IIASA Energy Program.
• International organizations based in Washington and New York (United Nations, World Bank, International Food Policy Research Institute): IIASA programs and scientists collaborate and advise on programs related to population, agriculture, energy, forests, and water.
• World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF): IIASA’s Ecosystem Services and Management Program cooperated with WWF on its 2012 Living Forests report.
Select Research Highlights
Following is a selection of highlights of US-IIASA research cooperation particularly IIASA activities of interest to U.S. policy makers. More detail on these collaborations is available in the links.
Energy and climate change research
- The Global Energy Assessment (GEA), spearheaded and hosted by IIASA, was a 5-year effort involving over 500 energy experts from around the world, more than 15% of whom were American, as authors, sponsors, advisors, and reviewers. Completed in 2012, the GEA aims to redefine the global energy policy agenda, identifying solutions for global energy challenges, such as global access, energy security, and mitigating local, regional and global environmental impacts. The U.S. DoE provided $1 million to support GEA, which went in part to setting up a US GEA Support Office at the Global Energy and Technology Foundation (GETF) in Washington. GETF sponsored stakeholder workshops in the U.S., and will cooperate with IIASA and the US NMO in disseminating the Report to the U.S. energy community in 2012-13.
- IIASA’s longstanding partnership with Stanford University’s Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) has provided the backbone of international collaboration in energy modeling, first through the International Energy Workshop, (1981-2006) where energy modelers from around the world compared energy projections. In 2007, the EMF-IIASA collaboration, in conjunction with IIASA’s Japanese NMO, the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), organized the Integrated Assessment Consortium (IAMC) at the request of IPCC to lead the integrated assessment modeling community in the development of new scenarios to be employed by climate modelers for the 5th IPCC Assessment Report due in 2014.
Ecosystem services
• IIASA scientists played a key role in the development of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) 2012 Living Forest report. The Report outlines approaches to achieve Zero Net Deforestation (ZNDD). To this end the WWF with IIASA developed the Living Forests Model, which calculates the effect of forces such as population growth and consumer demand, and describes possible consequences on food production, climate change, biodiversity, commodity prices and economic development.
• With Duke University, IIASA forestry and land use researchers analyzed Greenhouse Gas & Nitrogen Emissions Scenarios for U.S. Agriculture and Global Biofuels, documented in the 2012 report The Net Global Effects of Alternative U.S. Biofuel Mandates: Fossil Fuel Displacement, Indirect Land Use Change, and the Role of Agricultural Productivity Growth.
• IIASA’s ESM Program has cooperated since 2006 with NASA and Ukrainian institutions, in a project on the Carbon, Climate and Managed Land in Ukraine: Integrating Data and Models of Land Use project for NEESPI, the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) to understand the interactions between the ecosystem, atmosphere, and human dynamics in northern Eurasia.
Air quality and greenhouse gas mitigation
- IIASA’s Greenhouse Gas-Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) model, developed by the MAG Program, enables searches for sets of measures that simultaneously meet environmental targets on air quality and greenhouse gas reductions at least costs. The USEPA’s Clean Air Task Force collaborated with IIASA to use the GAINS model to prepare a handbook on black carbon, and IIASA studies are cited repeatedly in the USEPA’s March 2012 Report to Congress on Black Carbon (PDF)
- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) works with the IIASA Mitigation of Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gases (MAG) group to support the Arctic Council’s Task Force on Short-Lived Climate Forcers.
- In February 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced an international initiative, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants, that aims to reduce short-lived atmospheric pollutants that contribute to global warming and cause health risks. IIASA’s analyses contributed to that initiative.
Population
- IIASA's World Population Program produces one of the few independent alternatives to the demographic projections of the UN Population Division and the US Bureau of the Census, with a recent focus on global human capital that has been of particular interest to policy makers in the U.S. and around the world. Links with U.S. population researchers are well established.
- Wolfgang Lutz is a Member of the Committee on Population of the US National Academy of Sciences. Bill Butz, who joined the World Population Program when he stepped down as Director of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., serves on the National Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a Member of Board of Reviewing Editors ofScience.
- With funding from the Pew Research Center, IIASA is conducting a demographic assessment on the religious structure of populations in select countries.
Capacity Building
Over 1,600 students from 85 countries have participated in the IIASA Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) since it was established in 1977, approximately 245 of them American citizens and at least 360 from U.S. institutions.
The US NMO funds between 7 and 10 YSSP fellows annually from US institutions. In both 2011 and 2012, nine PhD students from the USA took part in YSSP.