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The Sustainability Research and Innovation (SRI) Congress is the world’s largest transdisciplinary gathering for the global sustainability community. Join us online or onsite in Panama City, Panama, to participate in sessions focusing on transdisciplinary research, policymaking, and more.

A new study investigates whether COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines complement or substitute each other, offering insights to policymakers about optimizing public health and economic outcomes.

IIASA Scientific Advisory Committee member, Elke Weber, has received the Patrick Suppes Prize of the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the USA, for her work on advancing the understanding of how people make important decisions in real-world environments.

The Munhwa Ilbo Daily Newspaper, a leading Korean media publication, has invited IIASA Interim Deputy Director General for Science, Wolfgang Lutz, to deliver a keynote address at the 6^th Munhwa Future Report 2023 international event in Seoul, Korea.

When people leave their rural lives behind to seek their fortunes in the city or agriculture is no longer profitable, the lands they toiled on are often left unused. A new perspective piece in Science shows that these abandoned lands could be both an opportunity and a threat for biodiversity, and highlights why abandoned lands are critical in the assessment of global restoration and conservation targets.

Science for Society Brief #1, May 2023. This brief presents insights from an event co-organized by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) to mark the Austrian launch of the Human Development Report 2021-2022, Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World.

IIASA will host the project partners and stakeholders of MOSAIC (Managing protective forests facIng clImate change compound events) for their first project management meeting and technical workshop. The event's aims are to cover issues of climate change data mining and structuring, with a focus on data freely available and its condition of uses; project storage infrastructure; downscaling and upscaling processes; and possible exchanges with relevant networks.

In recent conferences, the FLAM model, developed by researchers Andrey Krasovskiy and Shelby Corning, has captivated audiences with its valuable applications in wildfire dynamics and future projections under climate change scenarios. These presentations, held at renowned conferences and symposiums, have garnered positive feedback and paved the way for potential future collaborations.

Fungal networks interconnecting trees in a forest is a key factor that determines the nature of forests and their response to climate change. These networks have also been viewed as a means for trees to help their offspring and other tree-friends, according to the increasingly popular “mother-tree hypothesis”. An international group of researchers re-examined the evidence for and against this hypothesis in a new study.

Co-production is a term that has been cropping up more and more in discussions about public involvement and is fast becoming an integral feature of many research processes and proposals. Susanne Hanger-Kopp explains why not every project can or should include elements of co-production and how to make the most of such processes when they are used.

Until recently, most competition authorities have prioritized consumer welfare and efficiency in their approach to regulate industry markets. However, the multisided nature of the platform economy means that monitoring of markets must consider not just consumer welfare, but also the welfare of complementors, third parties, and all participants of digital platform ecosystems (DPE) in the short and long term.

A person using digital communication leaves behind a trail of information on their activities, their interactions, and even some about who they are. Social media has become quintessential to the modern lives of billions of people which means that billions of trails are recorded on social media and communications platforms. This data has come to be a treasure trove of aggregated information which scientists can use to decipher the most unique trends and behaviors on a societal level. As part of her ongoing research at ASA, Elena Rovenskaya presented on the significance of social media as a source of information for science and its usefulness in understanding complex systems behaviors.

On 25th and 26th of April 2023, IIASA researchers Elena Rovenskaya and Pratik Patil participated as panelists in the EGU conference, which brings together geoscientists from all over the world to discuss latest research on geosciences, climate change, risk and resilience, energy, citizen science, and more. Their contributions were based on their research as part of the Transformations within Reach project at the IIASA

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) develop long-term mitigation scenarios which play an essential role in the development of IPCC reports. These models, however, have been criticized for proposing solutions that are challenging to carry out due to a lack of consideration of social and institutional challenges. In the paper "A multidimensional feasibility evaluation of low-carbon scenarios by person" (Brutschin, et al., 2021), scientists proposed a versatile, multidimensional framework that allows for comparisons between decarbonization pathways by quantifying feasibility concerns. This online, interactive tool was developed to complement this paper and allows the user to examine this framework in more detail.

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) Extensions Explorer is a tool for visualizing and downloading quantitative elaborations of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), which emerged in the literature since the publication of the original set (e.g., GDP, population) of SSP-related indicators. The tool hosts scenarios of indicators such as Gender Inequality Index, Governance, Rule of Law, Human Development Index, and Migration Flows.

The Fair Mitigation Finance Explorer is the web app accompanying the paper 'Fairness considerations in global mitigation investments'. Users can select various indicators with a variety of weights to explore the ‘fair’ regional contributions to near-term regional mitigation investment needs. With this information, the web app determines the ‘fair-share’ regional contributions to their respective regional ‘cost-effective’ investment needs.

Researchers from the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) visited IIASA on 24 April to finalize a five-year collaboration on nature-based solutions for meeting climate and biodiversity targets, and to plan a proposal to continue their collaboration.

A list of publications written by IIASA Postdoctoral Schorals.