EDITORIAL
Best Paper Awards for 2008
As one of its initiatives, the Editorial Board of EMS instituted annual Best Paper Awards inaugurally in 2005. The aim of the awards is to recognize those authors whose paper epitomizes the aims, scope and high standards of the journal. It is essential that first of all candidate papers display high quality, innovation and rigour such as in the way their model or software testing is performed and reported. But they must also be interdisciplinary in their problem treatment and reasonably generic in their utility. For papers published in 2008 the Editors have decided for a second straight year to make a single award in each of three categories: Integrated Modelling; Generic Modelling and/or Software Methods; and Decision Support.
With support from Board members, we are pleased to report on the selections of the three Editors of EMS. The “Best Paper 2008: Integrated Modelling” category was awarded to Yuqiong Liu, Hoshin Gupta, Everett Springer and Thorsten Wagener for “Linking science with environmental decision making: Experiences from an integrated modelling approach to support sustainable water resources management.” In this paper the challenges involved in bridging science and decision making in water resources management are discussed with reference to lessons drawn from a long term integrated modelling project in the semi-arid southwestern USA. The authors present a generic framework and guidelines for effective decision support using integrated modelling and scenario analysis. The proposed approach aims to produce ‘usable’ scientific information, by improving its credibility, legitimacy and saliency for decision support.
The “Best Paper 2008: Generic Modelling and/or Software” category is “Integrating fuzzy multicriteria analysis and uncertainty evaluation in life cycle assessment” by Enrico Benetto, Christiane Dujet and Patrick Rousseaux. In this paper Life Cycle Assessment is combined with a fuzzy multicriteria evaluation technique to improve interpretation of impact assessment results and incorporate uncertainty analysis. The proposed methodology is demonstrated in an application to the LCA of electricity production scenarios.
The “Best Paper 2008: Decision Support” category was awarded to Rachel Warren, Santiago de la Nava Santos, Nigel Arnell, Michael Bane, Terry Barker, Christopher
Barton, Rupert Ford, Hans-Martin Füssel, Robin Hankin, Jochen Hinkel, Rupert Klein, Ciaron Linstead, Jonathan Kohler, Tim Mitchell, Tim Osborn, Haoran Pan, Sarah Raper, Graham Riley, John Schellnhüber, Sarah Winne and Dennis Anderson for “Development and illustrative outputs of the Community Integrated Assessment System (CIAS), a multi-institutional modular integrated assessment approach for modelling climate change.” This paper presents the development of CIAS, an integrated assessment model for climate change policy analysis, and its supporting software SoftIAM. CIAS combines various component modules to generate and compare avoided damages and mitigation costs of different climate policy scenarios.
Congratulations to all three teams for producing such excellent and valuable papers. These awards and those for 2009 will be presented at the Fifth Biennial meeting of the International Environmental Modelling and Software Society, with the theme “Modelling for Environment’s Sake” and held in Ottawa, Canada from July 5-8, 2010 (see www.iemss.org/iemss2010).
We are looking forward to assessing the 2009 Best Paper Awards, and hoping to see you at the iEMSs 2010 Congress in Ottawa next year.
Anthony J Jakeman (Editor-in-Chief ), Andrea E Rizzoli and Alexey A Voinov ( Editors)