According to the symposium's organizers: "The symposium in Israel is a major milestone in developing ties with this important organization for purposes of both research and implementation. IIASA is looking for strategic collaborations with Israeli researchers, especially in areas in which Israel is a world leader."
The international research organization IIASA, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, has decided to mark this event by holding a symposium hosted by Tel Aviv University in Israel, for the very first time.
IIASA is considered a world leader in research on issues of sustainability. One of its main goals is to promote the implementation of policy solutions for reducing the human footprint and improving the resilience of both natural and socioeconomic ecosystems, while promoting the goals of sustainable development from a complex systemic perspective. Headquartered in Laxenburg, Austria, the Institute currently includes 23 regional and national member organizations from Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. Israel joined IIASA in 2017.
The symposium will be led jointly by the Israel Committee for IIASA headed by Prof. Itai Sened, Dean of TAU's Gordon Faculty of Social Sciences, and the Ministry of Innovation, Science, and Technology, as well as faculty members and researchers from all Israeli universities, working in the fields of environment, demography, and climate. The event will be attended by general directors and chief scientists of various ministries in the Israeli government, as well as ambassadors of countries that are members of IIASA.
Dr. Vered Blass from the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at TAU, who co-leads the symposium, emphasized: "Holding the symposium in Israel is a major milestone in developing ties with this important organization for purposes of both research and implementation. IIASA is looking for strategic collaborations with Israeli researchers, especially in areas in which Israel is a world leader. Israel is a unique testcase, with the ability to take the organization's generic models and adapt them to the local context."
She added that IIASA addresses global issues, across national borders and research disciplines, to impact the future of humanity as a whole. The organization's position papers and studies are available to policymakers in countries worldwide, to help them generate effective, science-based policies for addressing these challenges.
One of the main panels at the symposium will include a lecture by world-renowned demographer Prof. Wolfgang Lutz on 'Systems analysis of populations, education, and environment and the interactions between them'. Series of sessions and discussions will address topics in demography, biodiversity and agriculture, water, energy, and transport.
According to Dr. Blass, the goal of applied systems analysis is not only to understand any given system, but also to propose how it should be changed. This broad outlook discerns that different systems are not isolated but rather interconnected. For example, the climate, the economy, and the biosphere all impact one another, generating a global system that contains various subsystems. With this kind of holistic approach, applied systems analysis can identify common advantages and synergies, where one move can improve two outcomes. For example, producing and using fuel from plants that emits carbon, via an indirect change in land use, or electric vehicles that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pollution in urban centers under certain conditions.
This challenging approach forces us to take a step back to include different aspects and build models of broad systems, in order to cover the various solutions and their impacts. For example, if in the past climate change was seen only as a scientific, physical problem, for which no practical policy could be proposed, introducing methodologies and models from economics and the social sciences enables the involvement of incentives and institutions that can come together to generate the needed change.
Dr. Blass: "The discipline of applied systems analysis is still new in Israel, in both academia and government, especially with regard to issues of climate change specifically and sustainability in general. These issues require a science-based policy that takes into consideration the various players in the system, the human, geographic, and technological complexities. Israel's policymakers must use models of this kind and collaborate closely with researchers and experts both in Israel and worldwide."