Search for projects

In fairSTREAM, IIASA researchers aim to understand and reconcile issues of fairness. This is a key aspect for managing risks in nexus issues, such as the food-water-biodiversity nexus, where conflicting views on procedural and outcome fairness often remain unresolved and jeopardize finding viable solutions. Addressing these issues is a major challenge that requires the integration of multiple sources of knowledge and the cooperation of many different societal actors.

The AmazonFACE project addresses the overarching question of how climate change will affect the Amazon forest, the biodiversity it harbors, and the ecosystem services it provides to humanity.

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in partnership with the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) and EuroCARE, is leading the EU-BIOCLIMA project: European Union Biodiversity and Climate strategies Assessment.

Calls to coordinate and strengthen the links between the global biodiversity and climate agendas are growing. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are one of the priorities identified by the UK UNFCCC COP 26 Presidency to achieve the goals set by the Paris Agreement.

Together with key stakeholders, NaturaConnect will co-develop and create knowledge, tools and capacity building programmes to support European Member States in implementing an ecologically representative, resilient and well-connected trans-European nature network (TEN-N), that builds on the existing network of European protected areas and Green and Blue Infrastructure.

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.

The global human population is growing and at 7.7 billion, there are currently more humans walking the Earth than ever before. Simultaneously, but far less conspicuously, rural populations have plummeted by nearly a quarter in the last 50 years.

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.  

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).

BIOCONSENT provides novel scientific knowledge and policy support by integrating socio-ecological approaches to assess outcomes of alternative conservation and restoration measures on forest biodiversity and ecosystem services provision across spatial and temporal scales at the biodiversity-forest-climate-water nexus.

European countries and regions have invested substantial amounts of resources into biodiversity conservation and knowledge. However, there continues to be limited availability at the EU-scale of harmonized, long-term, spatially explicit and regularly updated biodiversity data. This limits the uptake by policies and sectors that have an impact on biodiversity or that can mitigate biodiversity loss. How will EuropaBON address this challenge?

The Global LandScapes project is funded by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in the US and has the overall objective of developing a joint methodology and database to compute a map of global foodscapes and their development potential in view of planning for large-scale deployment of Nature based solutions (NBS).

The EU-funded project Plant-FATE aims to develop an eco-evolutionary vegetation modelling framework to assess the responses of biodiverse forests under drought.

ForestNavigator aims at assessing the climate mitigation potential of European forests and forest-based sectors through modelling of policy pathways, consistent with the best standards of LULUCF reporting, and informing the public authorities on the most suitable approach to forest policy and bioeconomy.  With a primarily European scope, ForestNavigator zooms into carefully selected EU Member States to enhance the consistency of the EU and national pathways, but the project also zooms out towards the global scale, and selected key EU trading partners, accounting for extra-EU future drivers and potential leakage effects.

RESIST will apply a multidisciplinary systems-thinking framework that aims to integrate (i) scientific evidence on key ecosystem processes driving climate change and (ii) socio-economic aspects driving stakeholder decision-making, both of which ultimately affect the Resilience of Ecosystem Services provided by Intact and Sustainably managed Terrestrial ecosystems under future scenarios.