Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on October 25th, 2012
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)
THE FULL PROGRAM OF DAY THREE INCLUDES A PLENARY AND SESSIONS – FOUR IN PARALLEL. THIS IS IN EFFECT THE WORKING DAY THAT WILL RESULT IN PLANS FOR THE FUTURE.
| DAY THREE, 26 OCTOBER 2012 – LAXENBURG | |
| 8:00 |
Bus Transportation from Vienna (Albertinaplatz) to IIASA, Laxenburg Conference Center (Schlossplatz)
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| 7:45-8:45 |
Registration at Laxenburg Conference Center (Schlossplatz)
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PLENARY – RESEARCH FOR A CHANGING WORLD
Laxenburg Conference Center, Theater
The final day of the Conference focuses on research that is able to identify and further develop solutions to the global challenges discussed during the Conference’s first two days. To find effective and efficient strategies, researchers need not only to operate at the level of their discipline, but to engage in cross-cutting, interdisciplinary efforts that exploit the power of systems analysis. In a set of parallel sessions, this research will be further explored and discussed in a number of roundtable seminars. Throughout Day Three, there will be plenty of opportunities to engage with researchers—in the poster session, at the multimedia exhibits, where hands-on experience can be gained with the tools developed at IIASA, or at any of the other activities organized during the breaks. The plenary session includes a summary of the challenges posed in the first two days of the Conference, and provides a transition into a day of presentations and discussions of how IIASA and its global networks will contribute to helping meet those challenges. |
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| 9:00-9:10 |
Moderator:
Statement:
Presentation:
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| 9:10-10:40 |
The moderated discussion in this session will focus on IIASA’s role and value from the perspective of its core national supporters, the IIASA National Member Organizations (NMOs). The Institute’s influence, its ambitious research goals, and its financial and intellectual independence are based on a network of NMOs from the Institute’s member nations around the globe. Founded as an East-West bridge-building Institute, IIASA’s focus and influence, as well as its membership, have evolved with the changing world. This dialogue features representatives of IIASA’s NMOs and NMO nations, who will examine IIASA’s role in supporting international policy decisions past and future, explore the Institute’s role in expanding the application of a systems approach to international and national challenges, and consider the benefits IIASA offers to the scientists and policy makers of its member nations. Introduction:
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| (9:15-9:35)– |
IIASA’s original mandate aimed at increasing understanding between societies divided by fundamental differences in worldview, both economic and cultural. With the end of the Cold War, the nature of those gaps changed, but the need for IIASA to help build bridges remains. IIASA’s NMOs, now and in the past, provide the fundamental networks that allow the Institute to play that bridge-building role. Framing Presentation:
Panelists:
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| (9:35-9:55) |
NMO Session 2: Research for Smoothing Transitions: Economic, Ecological, Political, Technological, Societal
The world is changing rapidly, with economic development, political upheavals, climate change, technology, and population all playing a role. IIASA develops and applies the tools to analyze and understand those changes and the risks they involve. IIASA’s NMOs recognize and support the value of the Institute’s neutral approach to these complex issues. Framing Presentation:
Panelists:
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| (9:55-10:15) |
The recognition of planetary boundaries and the global interconnectedness of the issues that are pressing the earth’s limits, such as water, food, ecosystem health, energy and population, are demonstrating the need to take a systematic approach to policies on every level from local to global. The “systems perspective” has become a commonplace in scientific and policy rhetoric, but it has always been central to IIASA’s mission. Every country requires more skills to recognize and analyze those issues, and IIASA’s NMOs are working with the Institute to develop innovative ways to build more capacity to place scientific and societal issues in a systems context. Framing Presentation:
Panelists:
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| (10:15-10:35) |
IIASA’s research can provide credible insight, of use for decision makers. IIASA’s NMOs are supporting new initiatives to connect the Institute with the individuals who make policy, through workshops and fora to define the questions and examine the implications of the analyses that IIASA considers. Framing Presentation:
Panelists:
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| 10:40-11:00 |
Coffee Break
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| 11:00-12:30 |
Parallel Sessions:
A number of different parallel sessions will feature IIASA’s cutting-edge research and the ways in which it is positively impacting on the world. Selected external speakers will complement IIASA scientists in these sessions, which will highlight, in particular, the power of systems analysis and the insights that can be gained through integrative, interdisciplinary research. |
| (11:00-12:30) |
Parallel Session 1: Securing Ecosystem Services: Food and Water
Laxenburg Conference Center: Theater In a world of increasing population and rising pressures on the environment, the supply of food and water will be foremost among the challenges identified by speakers during Day One of the Conference. Also under discussion will be the tremendous dietary changes taking place in some parts of the world in response to increasing wealth, which are adding to pressures to find sustainable solutions for food and water security and pressures on other ecosystem services such as biodiversity. Such solutions, which are being explored by IIASA researchers together with scientists at other leading institutes, will be the topic of this session. Moderator:
Panel Presentations:
Rapporteur:
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| (11:00-12:30) |
Parallel Session 2: Integrating Models of Socio-Ecological Systems
Laxenburg Conference Center: Marschall Room I A key challenge of systems analysis is to find common dimensions that work across multidisciplinary divides. This is particularly true for socio-ecological models in the sense that social models are typically expressed in terms of health, economic models in monetary currency, and ecological models in terms of bio-physical material or energetic resources. Too often the approach is simply to monetize environmental and human health flows, but more attention is now being paid to alternative methods of interlinkage. This session presents some of the work carried out by IIASA and its collaborators to bridge these descriptions through the use of various goal functions that can accept data from multiple currencies. Moderator:
Panel Presentations:
Rapporteur:
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| (11:00-12:30) |
Parallel Session 3: Synergies and Trade-offs among Multiple Sustainable Development Objectives
IIASA: Gvishiani Room There are still 1.4 billion people in the world without access to electricity and an additional billion with unreliable access. Energy poverty pervades the life of many families especially in the developing world. At the same time, emissions from the combustion of fuels contribute to global climate change and local pollution. Rising fuel imports may create additional unwanted dependencies. There are trade-offs between measures aiming at supplying an increasing population with clean and sustainable energy, but discovery of co-benefits can motivate the search for alternative pathways. This session presents some of the strong interactions between long-term GHG mitigation and human development, and how these two strands can be reconciled. Moderator:
Panel Presentations:
Rapporteur:
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| (11:00-12:30) |
Populations are not homogenous, and individuals differ across many dimensions, e.g. with respect to (social, economic, demographic, aspects and consumption behavior etc.). Behavior can differ according to place of residence (countries, rural/urban, smaller regions), age, gender, education status, health status, income status, and numerous other factors. However, many analyses that include population as a driver often ignore these differentials. This session presents research by IIASA scientists and external researchers that seek to enhance the analysis of differential vulnerability by taking education and human capital explicitly into account. Moderator:
Panel Presentations:
Rapporteur:
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| 12:30-14:30 |
Lunch and Poster session
Sponsored by Dr. Erwin Pröll, Governor of Lower Austria, and IIASA (Breakout Activities: Posters, research tools, publications, and much more will be on display throughout the conference.) ——————————
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| 14:30-15:30 |
Roundtable Seminars:
Roundtable discussions will give Conference participants the opportunity to delve more deeply into the issues raised during the parallel sessions and the previous days’ meetings, this time, however, in more informal and interactive settings bringing in their questions and opinions in a chaired roundtable seminar. Participants can choose from: |
| (14:30-15:30) |
Ecological foot printers have found that human demand for ecological services outstrips the capacity of the Earth to renew them. Given the existence of planetary boundaries, solutions need to be found in the form of i) more efficient and cleaner technologies and ii) of behavioral, and lifestyle changes. Diffusion of cleaner technologies can to some extent enable sustainable development while keeping consumption at a constant or growing level. On the other hand, changes in consumption patterns can help substantially in reducing, for example, pressures on land for food production. This discussion will focus on where these two issues intersect, namely, on social and technological solutions. We already know that technological solutions alone will most likely not be enough to comply with targets spelled out in adopted policy agreements like e.g., the 2 degrees target to halt global warming. Changes in consumer preferences and lifestyles will also be needed. How do we best assess the need for such changes and how can they be pursued? What can we learn from consumer behavior in the past and how useful is this knowledge if consumer preferences change when the technological setting changes? Moderator:
Kickoff statements:
Rapporteur:
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| (14:30-15:30) |
Roundtable Seminar 2: How to Meet our Needs in the Face of Pressures on Ecosystems?
Laxenburg Conference Center: Marschall Room I Food, energy, and water security have been the subject of several sessions during the three days of this Conference. While increasing population and growing wealth in emerging economies create higher demands on natural resources, we struggle to find solutions to conserve ecosystems services which are not priced in markets and which are difficult to monitor. This roundtable will enable participants to delve more deeply into issues of preserving biodiversity and other ecosystem services, while ensuring attainment of the UN Millennium Development Goals. Moderator:
Kickoff statements:
Rapporteur:
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| (14:30-15:30) |
While in past decades the public and academic debate has centered around the notion of sustainable development, in recent years the concept of green growth has emerged with its focus on the economic co-benefits of establishing new industries based on clean technologies. Many definitions and concepts have been surfacing, and in this roundtable discussion we will discuss the implications of these, what green growth really has to offer, and how it differs from solutions put forward in the past. Moderator:
Kickoff statements:
Rapporteur:
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| (14:30-15:30) |
This roundtable targets one of the most difficult questions for scientists: how to get the scientific message across in order to shape policy. In this session, ecological as well as economic topics will be discussed both in a European and international context. The discussions will encompass not only advice for scientists and policymakers on how to interact efficiently but also critically review the debate of policy relevance versus policy impact. Moderator:
Kickoff statements:
Rapporteur:
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| (14:30-15:30) |
Roundtable Seminar 5: Optimal versus Sub-Optimal Solutions
Laxenburg Conference Center: Franz Josef Room Recent criticism of modeling and optimization has resulted in suggestions that many of the challenges identified during the Conference should be addressed with different tools, such as simulation. In this roundtable we will pick up the debate and explore the scope of optimal versus “suboptimal” solutions. We take the debate further to include such questions as: What do we do if we have insufficient information to find the optimal strategy? Is a lack of information or inadequate modeling tools an excuse for inaction? Moderator:
Kickoff statements:
Rapporteur:
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| 15:30-16:00 |
Coffee Break
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| 16:00-17:30 |
Poster Awards
Summary of Day Three
Summaries and the Way Forward
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Breakout Activities
Multi-media exhibits will enable IIASA scientists to introduce their advanced modeling tools and approaches in an interactive, hands-on way. A display showing a selection of highlights from forty years of research at IIASA and interaction with member countries can be seen throughout the conference. IIASA information desks will provide opportunities for conference participants to browse IIASA publications, learn about the Institute’s capacity building activities and make a donation. 17:30 Adjourn and transportation back to Vienna. |
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