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
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
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.
Research Project
Ecosystem degradation and conversion now poses severe threat to the biodiversity, habitation, and food security of Kazakhstan and other countries of the Asian Dryland Belt (ADB) region. Without intervention, there is risk that a positive feedback loop could be triggered which worsens degradation by increasing the need for harsher chemicals and fertilisers to maintain yield. Sequestration of carbon into degraded land is a rapidly advancing field of research. Could this be a solution toward land restoration in the ADB?
Research Project
Existing national mitigation pledges and commitments place the world on a path well above the climate goal of the landmark Paris Agreement. Should the world exceed this limit, it is possible to draw down temperature through sustained use of so-called net-negative emissions (i.e., emitting less CO2 than is taken up by technical and natural processes). RESCUE will expand our current knowledge by exploring the sensitivity of the Earth system to deep mitigation futures which achieve the Paris Agreement goal under different regimes of dependence on net-negative emissions and carbon-dioxide removal.
Research Project
In this project on the Distributional Implications of Climate-related Disasters (DIoD) we study the feedback effects on macroeconomic aggregates due to changes in income distributions once a disaster has hit. We do so by introducing agent heterogeneity into two state-of-the-art disaster models already used by many researchers as well as policymakers.
Advancing Systems Analysis (ASA)
Exploratory Modeling of Human-natural Systems (EM)
Biodiversity and Natural Resources (BNR)
Water Security (WAT)
Population and Just Societies (POPJUS)
Equity and Justice (EQU)
Dynamic Model of Multi-Hazard Mitigation Co-Benefits (DYNAMMICs)
The Binary constrained Disaster model (BinD)
Social and Policy Simulations
Research Project
LAMASUS builds on i) decades of experience in direct policy support, ii) unique modeling tools, such as GLOBIOM, the only model that integrates agricultural and land use sectors, and CAPRI, MAGNET and CLUE, which underlie JRC’s land use policy assessments, and iii) novel approaches mobilizing machine learning and citizen science.
Research Project
A consortium consisting of the SYRR group of IIASA, ETH Zurich, and the InsuResilience Solutions Fund (ISF) will undertake macro-level socio-economic risk modelling, scenario assessment and policy analysis to understand how public sector climate and disaster risk financing strategies interact and complement risk reduction interventions in order to strengthen the resilience of vulnerable countries. IIASA will build on its CatSim Model to not only assess fiscal implications but also study broader resilience impact on relevant case study countries studied. The project will finally seek to develop recommendations on the design of smart support regarding comprehensive risk management for the case study countries.
Research Project
While the buildings sector is directly responsible for about 10% of Austria’s anthropogenic CO2 emissions, its carbon footprint is 3 to 4 times larger than that if indirect and life-cycle emissions are considered (dependent on the accounting method). In that regard, Austria’s building sector is representative of building sectors of other countries in the European Union. Moreover, the CO2 emissions attributed to the global building stock are structured in a similar way. Thus, due to its interlinkages with other sectors (notably energy generation and industry), building stock provides effective leverage points that are of critical importance for global and national mitigation efforts, and for a successful transition to carbon-neutral economy.
Research Project
CORE addresses SU-DRS01-2018-2019-2020 call for disaster-resilient societies. It analyzes natural & anthropogenic risks (earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, floods, terrorist attacks, industrial accidents, Covid-19). It focuses on vulnerable populations, preserving dignity & autonomy during emergencies. It investigates social media's ethical impact on autonomy, dignity, equity, & well-being as well as aims to provide recommendations for improved preparedness & resilience, considering human and social characteristics.
Research Project
AGORA project fosters European climate resilience through collaboration and community-based adaptation. It co-designs and implements tailored solutions, engages stakeholders, and promotes climate justice, empowerment, and societal transformation aiming for a climate resilient Europe with innovative approaches and effective policies.
Research Project
Recent technological and scientific advancements have improved our understanding of natural hazards. However, despite efforts, natural disasters continue to take a heavy toll on communities, resulting in loss of life, environmental impact, and economic damage. The MEDiate project aims to use a resilient-informed, service-oriented, and people-centered approach for developing a disaster risk management decision-support system by considering multiple interacting natural hazards and their cascading effects, changes in hazards, vulnerability, and exposure.
Research Project
Natural and man-made disasters are causing huge losses, which are likely to rise due to the risk ignorance, population and development growth in disaster-prone areas, as well as interdependencies among sectors, regions, locations, increasing current and future exposure and vulnerability. The interdependencies among systems and regions involve interactions between socio-economic, natural, technological systems. They resemble complex networks connected through various “balance” relations (supply-demand, input-output, inflow-outflow) at different levels. Disruption of such networks can trigger systemic risks associated with critical imbalances, exceedances of vital thresholds, which affect provision of goods (food, energy, water), environmental norms, endanger population and developments, thus undermining socio-economic-food-energy-water NEXUS security (SEFEW NEXUS security) at local, regional, national levels with possible global spillovers.
Co-development of integrated and multi-disciplinary advanced system analyses and decision support methods and tools is essential for stakeholders and experts to build up regional resilience through timely investments into disaster preparedness and response measures enabling to properly mitigate and adapt to systemic risks of all kinds.