Press releases

Russia is the world’s largest forest country. Being home to more than a fifth of forests globally, the country’s forests and forestry have enormous potential to contribute to making a global impact in terms of climate mitigation. A new study by IIASA researchers, Russian experts, and other international colleagues have produced new estimates of biomass contained in Russian forests, confirming a substantial increase over the last few decades.

What do pipes and anchors have to do with storing energy? More than you might think! A new IIASA-led study explored the potential of a lesser known, but promising sustainable energy storage system called Buoyancy Energy Storage.

Lifestyle changes for demand-side climate change mitigation is gaining more and more importance and attention. A new IIASA-led study set out to understand the full potential of behavior change and what drives such changes in people’s choices across the world using data from almost two billion Facebook profiles.

IIASA, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the Environmental System Research Institute (ESRI) are proud to announce the launch of version 4 of the Global Agro-Ecological Zones platform (GAEZ v4) – a research tool that supports sustainable development in the agricultural sector – on the occasion of the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought.

A new project funded under the Belmont Forum’s joint Collaborative Research Action on Pathways to Sustainability will develop novel tools and capacities to understand and manage interlinkages between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and support sustainable development pathways for African countries, tailored to local capacities and priorities.

Do you have a clear picture of what science says about past and future impacts of climate change in your country? Do you know how this knowledge has been generated and how reliable it is? The newly released open climate impacts encyclopedia ISIpedia was designed to provide state-of-the-art climate impact information by translating the latest climate impact science into understandable and informative texts.

To improve climate related risk management in the financial sector and facilitate a smooth transition toward a sustainable economy, IIASA researchers joined forces with other scientists and a network of over 60 central banks and financial market supervisors to publish an updated set of scenarios. They show early greenhouse gas emissions reductions can minimize both physical and financial risk - in contrast, delayed action or no action would drive up costs.

IIASA researchers have contributed to a new global campaign that illustrates the centrality of data to sustainable development with a project that uses citizen science to monitor marine litter in Ghana for official UN Sustainable Development Goals reporting.

What drives the feasibility of climate scenarios commonly reviewed by organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? And can they actually be achieved in practice? A new systematic framework can help understand what to improve in the next generation of scenarios and explore how to make ambitious emission reductions possible by strengthening enabling conditions.