Page - 30 - in options, Volume summer 2016

yssp 30 options + summer 2016 www.iiasa.ac.at people at iiasa Forecasting  landslides: Systems analysis gives  the  bigger picture Dalia Kirschbaum, YSSP’06 alumna, applies systems analysis and  citizen science to the study of landslides at NASA Of all the natural disasters which can sweep away life and property, landslides are among the most difficult to forecast. They result from complex interactions between rainfall, the land’s surface, and the soil structure. However, the increasing availability of remote‑sensing data is driving new research into the development of more effective landslide assessment systems. Dalia Kirschbaum is a Young Scientists Summer Program alumna who had combined research into multiple hazards with economics but soon found herself focusing on landslides. “I felt there was an opportunity to apply remote sensing data to landslides in new and different  ways,” says the scientist, who now works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in the US. At IIASA in 2006, Kirschbaum found that systems analysis enabled her to look at “the  question of disasters, hazards, and their impact from the economic perspective, from the insurance perspective, from the people who have to make decisions for emergency response.” At NASA Kirschbaum now applies her IIASA experience to developing a web‑based interface for visualizing landslide hazards. She says the more complex the problem, the greater the need for systems analysis. “We’ve already seen how land use has had an impact on landslides. The challenge now is in seeing how landslide frequency, or even occurrence, is going to change.” To fill in the data gaps, Kirschbaum plans to leverage the expertise of researchers and citizen scientists to create a global landslide database. She says it’s about understanding the bigger picture—”and that’s really what I got out of my experience at IIASA.” KS science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/bio/ dalia.b.kirschbaum Climate change policies could increase smog YSSP’15 participant and Peccei award winner Carlijn Hendriks explores the interlinkages between air pollution, bioenergy, and  climate change The EU has ambitious plans for reducing air pollution and climate change by 2050. Yet while the policy plans are separate, greenhouse gases and air pollutants come from the same sources, such as transportation and industry. Air  quality and climate change are also linked at a far more basic level: chemistry. The air pollutant ground‑level ozone, for  example, is of great concern because of its detrimental impact on human health and the environment. Ozone forms when certain compounds released by plants are oxidized in the presence of nitrogen oxides, a type of pollutant released through combustion. Projections for air pollution in 2050 show that ozone levels should decrease as air pollution goes down. But the processes that form ozone work faster at higher temperatures, so as climate change leads to hotter summers, ozone damage could increase. Finally, climate policies to increase bioenergy production could further add to ozone damage through an increase in the compounds that can be converted to ozone. In new research, conducted as part of the YSSP’15, Dutch PhD candidate Carlijn  Hendriks explored these complex interactions. Using multiple models of economic markets, greenhouse gas emissions, land‑use change, and air chemistry transport, Hendriks found that the effect of a warming climate on ozone production was the key factor, far outweighing the reductions in ozone that would come from current EU air quality policy by 2050. The smallest effect came from bioenergy production, which would cause only a slight increase in ozone damage. KL blog.iiasa.ac.at/hendriks-16 Dalia Kirschbaum Carlijn Hendriks