2013 INFORMS Annual Meeting
Plenaries and Keynotes
Presented by Pavel Kabat, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and Wageningen University, Netherlands
Narrowly focused, single-disciplinary science alone cannot adequately underpin policies and solutions to resolve major sustainability challenges. We must rapidly refocus intellectual and economic investments toward multi-scale, integrated, interdisciplinary approaches that consider social, economic and environmental aspects, that look across and between borders and sectors, and that identify feedbacks or the co-benefits of a policy or management decision, before it is made. One example of this "systems" approach is the Global Energy Assessment (GEA), a multiyear, multidisciplinary study (coordinated by IIASA). The GEA links energy to climate, air quality, human health and mortality, economic growth, urbanization, water, land use and other factors. The GEA scenarios find that energy access for all (by 2050) is possible with co-benefits of limiting warming to 2°C, improving air quality and human health, and stimulating economic growth within a green economy framework.
Learn more at http://www.informs.org