Celebrating Research on Health at IIASA; World Health Day 2025

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Links Between Climate Change, the Environment, and Health

Researchers across IIASA are exploring how a variety of climate hazards and stressors are affecting health, including wildfires in the Fire&Ice project and heat extremes in the DISCC-AT and SPARCCLE projects.

Another area of study is on air pollution and its effects on mortality and morbidity, including health co-benefits of climate mitigation, with the GAINS model, and contributions to the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change.  

Researchers are also studying the effects of urban infrastructure and green spaces on health, including how they can mitigate or amplify climate-health effects, through the Urban Releaf project.

In addition, the CLIMAKID project will provide a digital tool to causally link extreme weather and child undernutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa and India to global climate change.

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One Health

The project  bloom brings together an interdisciplinary team to explore the complex relationships between biodiversity, land use, and zoonotic disease spillover risk in West Africa. By integrating expertise in ecosystem function, socioeconomics, modeling, and stakeholder engagement, the project enhances understanding of these dynamics, with the aim to inform policies and conservation strategies that promote both human and ecosystem well-being.

As part of the SWITCH and CHOICE projects, researchers are developing the GLOBIOM health module, which links health impacts to dietary patterns. Additionally, the FACE Africa project explored how climate change indirectly affects nutrition and food availability through changes in crop production and land use.

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Health Systems 

Health systems play an important role in reducing climate risks on health.  However, they are also vulnerable to extreme weather events which can affect their capacity to deliver health services.  Researchers are examining how floods and heatwaves affect the provision of and access to routine maternal and child healthcare in the REACH project. 

Examining the macro-economic consequences of health-related shocks is a further area of focus.

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Ageing, Cognition, and Wellbeing

IIASA researchers are developing global measures of healthy aging and wellbeing, and exploring how factors like employment, family roles and environmental exposures, shape cognitive health over the life course, in the CHIAS project.

IIASA researchers also apply systems thinking to study multi-dimensional national well-being, with the identified theoretical relationships being validated and quantified using data for the OECD countries.