David LECLÈRE

During the Fourteenth IAMC Annual Meeting held online last 29 November – 3 December 2021, the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium was proud to honour David LECLÈRE (IIASA) with the Early Career Researcher Award for his paper
Leclère, D., Obersteiner, M., Barrett, M. et al.
Bending the curve of terrestrial biodiversity needs an integrated strategy
Nature 585, 551–556 (2020).
The paper developed an innovative framework for bridging recent efforts from the biodiversity modeling and integrated assessment modeling communities. The study answered fundamental questions about whether we can reverse the decline in terrestrial biodiversity and, if so, how this could be done.
The results demonstrated that immediate actions which include ambitious lifestyle changes, technological progress as well as better land use management would realize bending the current declining trend.
The method starts IAM generate scenarios of future land-use with sustainable development measures included in them. Then, these land-use scenarios are fed into biodiversity models. Multiple IAMs and biodiversity models are considered which gives helps characterize the uncertainty and robustness of the findings. This study identifies further joint research opportunities for the IAM and biodiversity research communities.

Honourable mention to:
Kaj-Ivar van der Wijst
(PBL) for his paper
van der Wijst, KI., Hof, A.F. & van Vuuren, D.P.
On the optimality of 2°C targets and a decomposition of uncertainty
Nat Commun 12, 2575 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22826-5
Kaj-Ivar graduated at end of October 2018 and started working at PBL on the EU horizon2020 project COACCH in November 2018. In this short period, he has published no less than six papers in high-end journals (Nature Communications, Nature Climate Change, and Environmental Research Letters), two of which as a lead author. He has developed his own meta-model which is capable of analyzing uncertainties in the causal change of climate change and what the effect of these uncertainties have on optimal climate response strategies, which is the topic of his PhD.
2021 LAA-ECA-ECRA Evaluating Committee: Kate Calvin, Leon Clarke, Jae Edmonds, Keywan Riahi, Roberto Schaeffer, Detlef van Vuuren, John Weyant