Benefits of Systems Science for Policy Support

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.

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