Press releases

Corporate climate spending now steers trillions of dollars in transition finance worldwide. Does it drive genuine climate action? Research shows that accounting flexibility alone can make a company's reported emissions vary by roughly a factor of two – enough to appear either as a climate leader or a laggard. A new Perspective in Nature Sustainability proposes developing industry-specific net-zero blueprints to close that gap.

Whether planning flood protection, food production, or financial investments, decisions about climate change should be based on an ensemble of projections as they depend on understanding the full range of plausible futures. IIASA researchers and partners have developed an open-source tool that makes it much faster to generate regional climate and impact projections while capturing the uncertainties that shape future climate risks.

As populations grow and economies develop, the world will need more roads, railways, and other mobility infrastructure, especially in rapidly urbanizing regions. The challenge is to provide that infrastructure while minimizing resource use and carbon emissions – a goal new research suggests is well within reach.

How do wildfires grow into catastrophic events? By tracing the earliest detectable origins of the devastating 2015 equatorial Southeast Asian fires, researchers found that most large fires had multiple origin points and identified the ecological, climatic, and human factors associated with where fires begin. These findings provide new insights that could help improve fire prevention and understanding of fire risks under climate change across tropical landscapes.

IIASA researchers contributed to a new international study showing that a combination of healthier diets, improved farm productivity, and reduced food waste could fundamentally reshape global agriculture, substantially reducing pressure on land and greenhouse gas emissions while delivering significant benefits for human health and the environment.

Freshwater ecosystems are under growing pressure worldwide, but conservation resources are limited. A framework developed by IIASA researchers and partners can help identify where conservation could prevent biodiversity loss and where restoration efforts are likely to have the greatest ecological impact across the United States and Europe.

Under the leadership of IIASA Director General Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber, the Science and Timber Construction Alliance (SITCA) was officially launched today. The initiative aims to transform the construction sector into a driver of climate protection through sustainable forest management and modern timber construction.

The Government of Barbados and IIASA have signed a letter of intent, formally launching Barbados’ path toward membership in the Institute and establishing a new partnership to apply advanced systems analysis and global modeling to the design of a regenerative economy.

Global migration has risen sharply from approximately 13 million people per year in 2000 to around 35 million people per year in 2023. This is according to a new dataset on human migration published in Nature by researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), IIASA, and the University of Hong Kong.