
The POPJUS Program continues and builds upon research activities previously undertaken in the IIASA World Population and Risk and Resilience programs. Insights into current and future population sizes, structures, and distributions are fundamental to understanding human impacts on ecosystems and simultaneously, the impact of environmental changes on human wellbeing differentiated by sub-populations.
The program’s research agenda embraces the key priority in the IIASA strategic plan by identifying sustainable development challenges and exploring people-centric systems solutions for sustainable, resilient, just and equitable societies. The program focuses on strengthening the human-centered and population-based approach, taking into consideration equity and the just distribution of opportunities, outcomes, and processes. In doing so, the program builds on existing strengths and expertise in population and human capital modeling as well as expertise in understanding, managing, and equitably governing systemic and existential risks associated with global change. The program will continue to invest in advancing its methods, approaches, and data to deliver results that can be incorporated into system analytical models, inclusive policy processes, and ultimately into equitable and effective policy pathways and transformations.
POPJUS Research Groups

Equity and Justice (EQU)
The EQU Group focuses on the human dimension of selected globally relevant policy challenges, with the aim of delineating and advancing their analysis, management, and governance with special attention paid to the design and application of equity and justice frameworks, both within the group and across IIASA.

Migration and Sustainable Development (MIG)
MIG focuses on applying advanced data collection and estimation methods to quantify and better understand the trends, patterns, drivers, and consequences of different types of migration considering its interactions with the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.

Multidimensional Demographic Modeling (MDM)
Through its research, the MDM Group aims to advance demographic modeling methods to assess and forecast population dynamics with a focus on demographic and spatial heterogeneity under different socioeconomic scenarios at the global, national, and sub-national level.
Wittgenstein Centre
POPJUS is one of the three pillars of The Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a collaboration among the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the University of Vienna.
Read POPNET Newsletter WIC Report of Activities 2018–2022
Models, tools, datasets
Projects
Staff
News

31 May 2023
Quantifying Earth System Boundaries for a just world on a safe planet

23 May 2023
Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would save billions from dangerously hot climate

04 May 2023
Researchers from Norwegian Geotechnical Institute visit IIASA
Events
05 June 2023 Ispra, Italy-webstreamed event
IIASA at a panel discussion with EC Vice-President Dubravka Šuica
06 December 2023 Vienna, Austria
Wittgenstein Centre Conference 2023-Exploring Population Heterogeneities
Focus

16 May 2023
Would Vienna still be Vienna without migrants?
What would Vienna look like without migrants, and what kind of socioeconomic implications would such a situation have? IIASA researchers Anne Goujon and Thomas Schinko delved into these questions in response to a recent public debate on the topic.

08 May 2023
Stakeholder engagement, co-production, and transdisciplinary research
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.

16 March 2023
Artificial intelligence, fairness, and digital regulation: can the West learn from China?
Western accounts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in China often paint a dystopian picture of an Orwellian surveillance state. But what really makes industry practitioners in the world's second-largest digital economy tick? 2022 IIASA Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) participant Junhua Zhu, wants to lift the veil, taking a deep dive into the Chinese AI ecosystem.
Publications
Watson, M., Brown, C., Handmer, J., Kroll, C., Wein, A., Helgeson, J., Rose, A., Dormady, N., & Kim, J. (2023). Methods and lessons for business resilience and recovery surveys. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 93 e103743. 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2023.103743.
Heo, N., Chang, H.-C., & Abel, G. (2023). Investigating the distribution of university alumni populations within South Korea and Taiwan based on data from the LinkedIn advertising platform. Cities 137 e104315. 10.1016/j.cities.2023.104315.
Rockström, J., Gupta, J., Qin, D., Lade, S.J., Abrams, J.F., Andersen, L.S., Armstrong McKay, D.I., Bai, X., Bala, G., Bunn, S.E., Ciobanu, D., DeClerck, F., Ebi, K., Gifford, L., Gordon, C., Hasan, S., Kanie, N., Lenton, T.M., Loriani, S., Liverman, D.M., Mohamed, A., Nakicenovic, N. , Obura, D., Ospina, D., Prodani, K., Rammelt, C., Sakschewski, B., Scholtens, J., Stewart-Koster, B., Tharammal, T., van Vuuren, D., Verburg, P.H., Winkelmann, R., Zimm, C. , Bennett, E.M., Bringezu, S., Broadgate, W., Green, P.A., Huang, L., Jacobson, L., Ndehedehe, C., Pedde, S., Rocha, J., Scheffer, M., Schulte-Uebbing, L., de Vries, W., Xiao, C., Xu, C., Xu, X., Zafra-Calvo, N., & Zhang, X. (2023). Safe and just Earth system boundaries. Nature 10.1038/s41586-023-06083-8.
Lenton, T.M., Xu, C., Abrams, J.F.., Ghadiali, A., Loriani, S., Sakschewski, B., Zimm, C. , Ebi, K.L., Dunn, R.R., Svenning, J.-C., & Scheffer, M. (2023). Quantifying the human cost of global warming. Nature Sustainability 10.1038/s41893-023-01132-6. (In Press)
de Goer de Herve, M., Schinko, T. , & Handmer, J. (2023). Risk justice: Boosting the contribution of risk management to sustainable development. Risk Analysis 10.1111/risa.14157. (In Press)