The Sustainable Service Systems (S3) Research Group within the Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) Program at IIASA is recruiting a researcher in Integrated Assessment Modeling with an emphasis on energy needs, decent living standards, and human wellbeing.

background

The IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) Program is one of the leading scientific research institutions in the domain of integrated assessment of climate change and the systems transition to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). IIASA has a long-standing tradition in the development of scenarios with strategies for climate mitigation, and also has spearheaded discussions on energy access and energy poverty. This position is about the intersection between these two streams of work: developing the tools that can quantify futures with environmental action and decent living for all.

The desired Early Career Researcher will contribute to developing open-source modeling methods and data to study the characteristics of energy and other resource needs in transitions, across sectors. The successful candidate will work with the DESIRE model (Kikstra et al., in review) that links bottom-up energy and resource needs with climate scenarios produced with models like MESSAGEix (https://docs.messageix.org). The objective of the research is to model sustainable and just transitions in order to support policy making at different scales. The candidate is expected to join existing research efforts (e.g., just transition pathways activities for the Earth Commission or the EU Horizon project ELEVATE), while also helping identify, plan, and create new opportunities and research directions.

The role

The work will include, but is not limited to:

• Development and application of the DESIRE model and related software and data sets, potentially including the MESSAGEix modeling framework.
• Complementary, quantitative analysis of the energy and other resource (e.g., materials) needs, including service provisioning in the buildings sector, the transport sector, and industry.
• Analysis of Decent Living Standards deprivations.
• Analysis of energy and other resource needs through using Life Cycle Analysis tools and Environmentally-Extended Input-Output tables.
• Development of equitable and just energy demand scenarios, through narratives incorporating all of the above phenomena.

The successful candidate will also represent IIASA and ECE in contributions to ongoing, multi-institution projects and fora, such as ELEVATE, the EDITS project, and follow-up studies from the JustTrans4All project.

main tasks and responsibilities

The successful candidate will closely collaborate with researchers from the IIASA ECE Program in addressing the following tasks:

• Contribute to developing to conceptual models of human needs and Decent Living Standards, by identifying relevant methods from the literature; improve on these; source appropriate data/measures from diverse sources; and implement analysis with a high degree of rigor. For instance, derive final energy intensities (and material intensities) from Life Cycle Analysis and Input-Output data, and model efficiency improvements.
• Assist with the development and maintenance of the DESIRE model according to recognized best practices in scientific software development.
• Produce figures, maps, and visualizations to check results and efficiently communicate findings.
• Collaboratively develop model code that is version-controlled, documented, and reproducible, to enable low-cost adaptation of methods for different spatial scopes and/or input data sets.
• Present methods and results to both technical and non-technical audiences. Initiate and organize conference sessions and workshops.
• Use post-processing modules (such as a tool downscaling regional data to the national level) related to MESSAGEix and other modelling tools.
• Analyze and describe scenario ensembles created with Integrated Assessment Models.
• Contribute to, and lead where feasible, the publication of relevant results in peer-reviewed journals and actively engage in dissemination efforts such as scientific conferences and workshops, stakeholder and policy events.