Division of Information Technology, Engineering and the Environment
Institute for Sustainable Systems and Technologies
Institute for Sustainable Systems and Technologies
Anthony John Jakeman (B.Sc., Ph.D.)Tony Jakeman is Professor,
Centre for Resource and
Environmental Studies and Director of the Integrated Catchment
Assessment and Management Centre, The Australian National University. He
has been an Environmental Modeller for 28 years and has over 250
publications. His current research interests include integrated
assessment methods for water and associated land resource problems, as
well as modelling of water supply and quality problems including in
ungauged catchments.
Other scientific and organisational activities include: Editor-in-Chief,
Environmental Modelling and Software (Elsevier) since 1996; Foundation
President, International Environmental Modelling and Software Society;
President, Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New
Zealand, Inc.; Director, International Association for Mathematics and
Computers in Simulation; and regularly a member of scientific advisory
committees of international conferences.
Implementation of the concept of sustainability is
very uncertain and subjective, but modellers and modelling can play a
vital role in managing our environment sustain ably. The shortcomings of
environmental models are plain, but such models can, as a minimum,
clarify possible consequences of decisions. At best they may also
indicate relative likelihoods and extents of outcomes well enough to
support decisions that yield much more sustainable outcomes than at
present.
One can communicate the need for integration in different ways. From a
management perspective, integrated river basin management requires
integration of: (i) different objectives and their related outcomes,
like economic efficiency, social equity and ecological integrity; (ii)
all water resources (surface water, groundwater, estuaries); (iii)
water- and land-related issues; (iv) different types of water use
(agricultural, ecological, domestic, industrial, recreational); (v) all
water users and everyone affected by water uses.
It is clear that the integrated modelling of problems in river basins
poses considerable difficulties. These systems are complex, distributed
in space, dynamical (with time-spread responses to change), and
heterogeneous. Their models must cover a range of sciences (e.g.
hydrology, ecology, agriculture, forestry, economics, psychology, even
demography, sociology and politics) and a range of categories of people
affected. The evolving discipline of Integrated Assessment (IA), which
will be discussed, aims to deal with such systems, including the human
component.
Integrated Scenario Modelling (ISM) is a core activity of many IA
exercises. It involves a model as an approximation of the system under
study. The model allows the simulation of how input drivers (scenarios)
such as climate and human activities yield outputs (indicators)
representing the states of the system. In IA, the system is extended so
that policy and management link to the controllable human activity
inputs.
The talk will characterise the different types of integrated modelling
that are available and illustrate how some of these have been used in
several case studies. It will also summarise the lessons that we have
learnt.
