Options Magazine, Summer 2023: IIASA researcher Giacomo Falcetta is dedicated to making a meaningful difference in the world by developing practical and sustainable solutions that can be readily implemented by policymakers.
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How could implementing renewable energy solutions help lift more than 600 million rural Africans out of poverty? How could this simultaneously provide one fifth of the regional population with the sufficient, nutritious, and reliable food sources they lack? How are water, energy, food, and environment systems impacting each other, and how should policy leverage the co-benefits of these interactions?
These are just some of the questions Giacomo Falchetta is working on in the Long-Term Joint European Union–African Union Research and Innovation Partnership on Renewable Energy (LEAP-RE) in which the Energy, Climate, and Environment Program is a partner.
“IIASA brings global perspectives to policymakers so that regional policies consider global challenges, and vice versa. The work I do at IIASA allows me to take local perspectives into account when identifying global trends,” explains Falchetta.
Falchetta is a systems modeler who is passionate about analyzing global trends that were created from many local inputs and utilizes the Google Earth Engine for completing geographical analysis of satellite images. For example, household surveys can obtain local perspectives and combing these from many local areas enables him to identify trends. Using this approach, he has analyzed changes in land cover, measured pollutant concentrations, and identified the potential for solar and wind energy.
When describing the impact he hopes to make, he says, “I want to create a positive impact in the world by creating feasible and sustainable solutions that policymakers can implement as they take a systems approach.”
By Monika Bauer