Page - 15 - in options, Volume summer 2015

www.iiasa.ac.at 15summer 2015 + options Eureka I IASA has always recognized the necessity, and power, of researchers from different disciplines working together. At IIASA’s home base, social scientists, natural scientists, engineers, and computer scientists communicate and collaborate to explore some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Partly to encourage such teamwork and solution-focused research, IIASA organizes its research programs, not by discipline, but within three global areas: Energy  &  Climate Change; Food & Water; and Poverty & Equity. It is an infrastructure and environment that attracts some of the world’s top scientists. “The combination of the interdisciplin- ary research environment and the systems perspective is what brought us to IIASA,” says IIASA Distinguished Visiting Fellow Simon  Levin, a professor of ecology at Princeton University who studies the complexity and interconnection of socio- economic and environmental systems. Working with a team of ecologists, mathe- maticians, physicists, and international relations experts including IIASA scientists, Levin recently identified the importance of developing adaptable systems for finance and international relations. Such  systems could help reduce the risk of major system collapses such as the 2008 financial crisis, Levin says. “It is a highly interdisciplinary envi- ron ment and there are only a few places in the world that can provide that,” Levin  says. Looking at the big picture The complexity of many real world problems is often due to the high degree of interconnectivity that inherently exists in them, Levin says. “That means increasingly, we can’t study an economic system without thinking, for example, about the impact it’s having on the environment,” Levin  says. “And we can’t think about protecting environmental systems without thinking about the economic dimensions.” Traditionally, scientists have had a tendency to look at one local system in isolation; but  to do so ignores what happens when such systems become highly connected, Levin says. Seemingly small and unlikely risks—termed “femtorisks”—can lead to major collapses or crises in such systems. And the complexity makes it challenging to model the potential outcomes of such risks. 