Research Project
The Global Energy Assessment (GEA), launched in 2012, defines a new global energy policy agenda – one that transforms the way society thinks about, uses, and delivers energy. Involving specialists from a range of disciplines, industry groups, and policy areas, GEA research aims to facilitate equitable and sustainable energy services for all, in particular the two billion people who currently lack access to clean, modern energy.
Research Project
Building Arctic Futures: Transport Infrastructures and Sustainable Northern Communities (INFRANORTH)
The "new Arctic" is drawing global interest due to geopolitics, militarization, resource exploration, tourism, and rising environmental alarms amidst swift climate shifts. As transport infrastructures evolve or expand, a pressing concern emerges: Will these frameworks bolster enduring human settlement and sustainable Arctic living, or will they favor transient dwellers like tourists and shift workers? Could transport systems be the key to preserving northern communities?
Research Project
The NATURANCE project is funded by the Coordination and Support Actions of the Horizon Europe Framework Programme. The main objective of the NATURANCE project is to examine technical, financial and operational feasibility and performance of solutions that are built upon and combine disaster risk financing & investments with Nature-based Solutions (NbS).
Research Project
The HuT is an Innovation Action project funded by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme. The project addresses the distributive justice implications of extreme climate event impacts and aims at developing innovative and procedurally just Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) solutions for dealing with extreme climate events.
Research Project
This project aims to capture the medium to long-term spillover effects of financial markets and related stakeholders such as regulatory institutions on climate relevant emissions from land-use and changes to its pattern. Previous research has emphasized the spillovers of shocks, volatilities, and policy decisions from financial markets to commodity prices and thus on agricultural decisions. However, the long-term impacts of these spillovers, in terms of emissions have not been explored yet in a systematic global manner.
Research Project
MultiFutures systematically broadens the scope for policy action towards sustainable societies by assessing and developing transition scenarios based on alternative economic paradigms. This involves extending established transition scenarios (e.g. the EC's 'Long term strategic vision' scenarios or the IEA’s net zero scenarios) to include alternative economic paradigms that are based on a wide spectrum of sound economic and social theories and have demonstrated potential to address global challenges. These paradigms introduce new policy options and instruments, which we aim to critically assess regarding their relevance, effectiveness, and potential trade-offs.
Research Project
Forest restoration has high-level political support: the UN declared 2021-2030 the decade of restoration, and governments have committed to restore 350 million ha of forest by 2030 under the Bonn Challenge. However, there is strong debate about where and how restoration should take place, and what benefits forest restoration could provide for carbon sequestration and storage, biodiversity, and people’s livelihoods.
Research Project
European biodiversity is in decline, with can impact important natural services, such as pollination, water provisioning or climate mitigation. Our best chance to halt and reverse biodiversity loss are the expansion and more effective management of protected areas and our natural resources, as also stated by European. Existing protection efforts have largely been insufficient to halt biodiversity loss. There is increasing recognition that an implementation of the biodiversity policies needs adequate planning in an informed decision making process to identify which areas are best to conserve, improved in management or be restored.
INSPIRE will support Member States in making decisions on how to address some of the objectives of the Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, such as the expansion of the Natura 2000 network, to achieve the 30% protection/ 10% strict protection targets, or how to best integrate biodiversity conservation into other sectors under current policy priorities (e.g., Green Deal, CAP, CFP, and other sectoral Directives).
Research Project
Yoma is a digital platform that aims to support African youth on a “learning to earning journey” with three impact areas: digital skills, social change & environmental impact. The platform plans to leverage a token economy as part of an incentive system for youth action that tackles social and environmental challenges. The project will use IIASA citizen science apps to encourage measurement and monitoring of youth-led environmental impact initiatives.
Research Project
The project Data-driven understanding of low-carbon lifestyles (LOW-AI) aims at using social media data to understand behavior change with respect to low-carbon lifestyles. In order to limit global warming to a safe level of 1.5℃, individual action is required. LOW-AI deploys social media data to monitor lifestyle changes and attitudes towards lifestyle changes in the global population, developing tools that can be implemented with a higher geographical reach and are less costly than traditional approaches.
Research Project
PHOENIX (Human Mobility, Global Challenges and Resilience in an Age of Social Stress) is a Belmont Forum funded project that aims to examine how Global Changes - including environmental and climate changes, demographic changes, changing consumption patterns, energy and land-use, developments in the politics of food and mental health, and socio-cultural transformations - impact mobility.
Research Project
GRANULAR is a project that will last for four years, involving different disciplines and countries, with the aim of creating new datasets, tools, and methods to better understand rural areas. By doing this, we hope to gain new insights into the unique characteristics, dynamics, and drivers of change in rural areas. Using this newly generated and collected knowledge, we aim to help those involved in rural development to design place-based policies that are specifically tailored to the needs of each individual area. Ultimately, GRANULAR hopes to support rural actors in their efforts to promote sustainable territorial development.