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© Samrat35 | Dreamstime - © Salim, Hyderabad © Tom as G riger | D ream stim e - © M atth ew C oop er IIASA corner Matthew Cooper, a 2018 YSSP participant and Peccei award winner uses satellite data to highlight how climate change impacts vulnerable populations. Cooper, a PhD student from the University of Maryland, has a broad range of experience that includes being part of the US Peace Corps and social- ecological fieldwork in Mali, Uganda, the Philippines, and Alaska. He participated in the 2018 YSSP as part of the Ecosystems Services and Management, and Risk and Resilience programs. Cooper was awarded the IIASA Peccei award for his outstanding policy-based research on mapping the effects of weather extremes and land use on the growth of children. He says that being at IIASA as part of the YSSP and collaborating with world-class researchers working systemically in the fields of risk and earth observation data really pushed his research to a new level. Funded by the award, Cooper returned to IIASA for three months in 2019 to build on the work he had completed the year before. He led a study looking at how one of the main effects of climate change – more severe and frequent droughts – impacts especially children in poor countries. “In agrarian parts of developing countries, the weather affects everything,” Cooper says. “We often don’t look at the ripple effects of climate change. These are hard to predict and model, because food systems and economies are incredibly complex, and often resilient and vulnerable in ways that are hard to anticipate.” Mapping at-risk populations at the global scale Safa Fanaian participated in the 2019 Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) and has since won funding from National Geographic to conclude her fieldwork in India. Originally from India, Fanaian has a background in environmental science and water management. She is currently a second-year PhD student at the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford University in the UK. She decided to apply for the YSSP because of the institute’s background in complex systems analysis for water and risk. Her YSSP project titled Rivers and cities: Exploring complex water-risk and its governance, aimed to understand how the governance of water risk affects rivers and cities. “I was trying to understand the past – how historic governance practices shaped the present and what possibilities the future holds,” she explains. Looking back on the three months that she spent working at IIASA, Fanaian says that her YSSP experience was a constant learning process. “There was always support and supervision for any question or doubt that I had about my work. It was a very enriching experience,” she says. On top of her rewarding experience at IIASA over the summer, Fanaian has been awarded a National Geographic Explorer grant, which will allow her to do the final part of her fieldwork in Guwahati, a riverine city in the northwest of India. She will be analyzing how the current governance structure works, and how risk governance can be improved for the future. Understanding the history of governance structure in water risk management People profiles Matthew Cooper: cooperm@iiasa.ac.at www.iiasa.ac.at/ysspBy Luiza Toledo By Rachel Potter www.iiasa.ac.at30 Options Winter 2019/20