Republic of Korea
The NRF is a national organization responsible for the overall planning and funding of research in all academic disciplines, including basic and applied science and engineering, as well as humanities and social sciences. The NRF supports academic and R&D activities, and promotes international cooperation and exchanges in academia and R&D.
Professor Seung Jong Lee, the President of the NRF, is the Council Member for the Republic of Korea and is also a member of the IIASA Program Committee.
Hyesoo Kim (MS) of the Directorate of International Affairs at the NRF is the NMO Secretary.
Dr. Joon Sik Lee, Professor at the School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, is a Member of the IIASA Science Advisory Committee (SAC). The SAC is tasked, primarily, with providing the scientific direction for fulfilling IIASA’s missions and goals.
Key Relationships and Collaborations
IIASA collaborates and cooperates with numerous scientists and policy makers throughout the Republic of Korea. The following list includes a few of IIASA’s key institutional relationships in the Republic of Korea, in and out of government.
- Korea Forest Research Institute (KFRI): IIASA’s ESM Program has a Memorandum of Understanding with the KFRI to develop a long-term research partnership.
- Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Research Center of Korea (GIR): IIASA’s MAG Program has an MOU with GIR to develop research in the area of low carbon green growth, cooperating with IIASA ESM and ENE programs.
- Korea Water Forum: IIASA is cooperating with the Korea Water Forum on a Global Water Futures and Solutions: World Water Scenarios project to be launched at the Global Water Forum in Daegu, Korea in 2015.
Select Research Highlights
Collaborations between IIASA and the Republic of Korea are spread over a wide variety of IIASA research programs. A few of the recent highlights are described here.
Ecosystem Services and Forestry:
- The Director of KFRI’s Center for Forest and Climate Change, along with a senior scientist, visited IIASA in September 2012 to consider plans for long-term research collaborations that would apply and extend IIASA’s methodologies to issues related to Korean forest carbon modeling. If successful, this might serve as a pilot for other national/country-level approaches in Asia.
- In cooperation with scientists at Kookmin University (KMU) in Seoul, UNIDO, and the Japanese National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), IIASA scientists have used ESM models to study the capacity for BioEnergy in combination with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) in South Korea as a greenhouse gas mitigation tool.
- One KFRI scientist is spending a year at IIASA, beginning in autumn 2012, working on research related to forest fires.
- In 2007, IIASA’s Ecosystem Services and Management (ESM) Program began efforts to help bridge the North and South Korean forest sectors through an integrated large-scale international reforestation program to support the sustainable management of Korean forests. The project involved IIASA, South Korea, North Korea, and other international experts.
Fisheries and Streams:
- IIASA’s Evolution and Ecology Program (EEP) works with Korean researchers at Pusan National University, Pukyong National University, the Seoul National University, and the National Fisheries Research and Development Institute to apply IIASA’s expertise in eco-genetic models and adaptive dynamics models to understand Korea’s fisheries and fisheries ecosystems and inform fisheries management. EEP and its partners are exploring fisheries and climate impacts on Korean chum salmon, the causes of sardine-anchovy fluctuations, and links between aquatic insect diversity and stream pollution and cleanup activities.
Adaptation and risk:
- Korean scientists participate in theIntegrated Disaster Risk Management (IDRiM) Society, founded in 2009 as an outgrowth of the annual risk management conference jointly sponsored by IIASA’s Risk, Policy, and Vulnerability (RPV) Program and theDisaster Prevention Risk Institute (DPRI)at Kyoto University. Scientists from Inje University and the Korea Forest Research Institute, for example, have presented at the annualIDRiM Conference.
- The Science and Technology Policy Institute (STEPI) in Seoul, Korea is collaborating with IIASA Applied Systems Analysis (ASA) researcher Leena Imola in a project entitled “7 Shocks and Korea” aimed at understanding long-term national resilience requirements that emerge from the increasing uncertainties in the global physical and social environments.
Air quality and GHG mitigation:
- There is ongoing collaboration between researchers at GIR in Seoul and the IIASA Mitigation of Air Pollution & Greenhouse Gases (MAG) Program to address how a low carbon green economy in Korea could look in practice and what kind of fundamental changes are required. To that end, they are developing a novel quantitative tool to analyze transition pathways to low carbon green economies at the national scale. In addition, Dr. Young-Hwan Ahn, an energy and environmental economist formerly with GIR and the Korea Energy Economics Institute (KEEI), has been working with the MAG Program since June 2011 on applying the Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Control Synergies (GAINS) model to Korea.
- Since 1998, Korean scientists, via Yonsei University, have been participants in the model-intercomparison study of long-range transport and sulfur deposition in East Asia study (MICS-ASIA). The aim of the project has been to develop strategies for reducing emissions and long-range transport of SO2 and sulfates in Asia.
Energy, climate change, and sustainability:
- Two expert teams from South Korea participated in the Asian Modeling Exercise project as part of a Consortium coordinated by the Joint Global Change Research Institute in the USA. IIASA’s Energy Program is an active participant in the Steering Committee. The modeling teams from China, India, Japan, and the US, as well as IIASA, explored international policy architectures with regional modelers with a goal of better articulating the role of Asia in addressing climate change.
Population and health:
- Since 2007, IIASA in collaboration with the Vienna Institute of Demography has developed reconstructions of the population - by age, sex and four levels of educational attainment - back to 1970 and projections to 2050 according to several scenarios for 120 countries. With the Asian MetaCentre, this analysis was further refined for the entire Southeast Asian region and is presented in the Asian Demographic and Human Capital Data Sheet 2012. According to the study the population of South Korea is expected to decline from 48.2 million in 2010 to 43.7 by 2050.
(For more information see http://www3.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/research/researchPrograms/WorldPopulation/PublicationsMediaCoverage/ModelsData/models_and_data.html)
Capacity Building
IIASA’s annual Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) offers advanced level PhD candidates the opportunity to work with IIASA scientists over a 3-month period, with the explicit aim of refining or extending their research skills in the area of systems analysis. Since the first Korean participant in 2007, a total of 10 students from the Republic of Korea have completed the program, working on research projects in evolutionary ecology, forestry and population studies. Four Korean students took part in the 2012 YSSP, working with the Population, EEP and MAG Programs.