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The IIASA Just transitions to net-zero carbon emissions for all (JustTrans4All) project, which forms part of a suite of projects under the IIASA Strategic Initiatives Program, will contribute to novel analyses of transition pathways that are socially and environmentally just. The project will inform policy design, aiming to achieve high levels of human wellbeing within planetary boundaries in line with the UN 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement.

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.

'Risk-layering' strategies to reduce, retain and transfer disaster risk not only protect productive assets and lives, but implemented appropriately, could yield a number of additional benefits that could enhance wellbeing and resilience. Yet, conventional static macroeconomic models are not capable of analysing how alternative fiscal resource allocations to risk-layering options may affect developing countries’ growth trajectories under the impact of climate change.

Landslide EVO brings together experts in environmental hazards, engineering social sciences resilience, citizen science, and computational modelling to improve disaster resilience in Western Nepal.

Adapting to increasing climate-related risks requires an evaluation of the decision points and pathways leading to or emerging from these decisions. The Pathways project analyses the key drivers and developments that influence these past and future dynamics.

Loss and Damage (L&D) has gained traction since it became apparent that climate change would lead to impacts that cannot, or will not, be tackled by mitigation or adaptation. While current research mainly focuses on L&D in the Global South, our objective is to provide policy-relevant scientific insights from the perspective of Austria, a Global North country.

Educational and research institutions can provide necessary stimuli for societal changes. To provide graduates with these necessary competences to overcome the Global Grand Challenges a paradigm shift is needed, enabling new methods and ways of thinking, engagement and attitudes towards sustainable development.

PHUSICOS is an Innovation Action project funded by the EU Horizon 2020 program. It will demonstrate how nature-based solutions provide robust, sustainable and cost effective measures for reducing the risk of extreme weather events in rural mountain landscapes.

In WaterStressAT we assess water availability and demand in Austrian regions considering alternative socio-economic and climate futures. This is to understand the risk of water stress and associated management opportunities. We are in the process of establishing a stakeholder co-design process spanning the entire project duration involving joint problem-framing, participatory modelling, and co-producing bottom-up water stress scenarios as well as risk management options.

To manage the growing threat of wildfires, IIASA researchers incorporate equity and justice dimensions into risk management advice as part of the EU-funded project FIRELOGUE, developed under the Horizon Europe programme for the European Green Deal. IIASA has contributed its knowledge of different disciplines, sectors, and stakeholder groups to help develop a new set of strategies.

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.

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).

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.

The project is guiding the pursuit for sustainability by co-developing a Sustainable Agriculture Matrixis (SAM) supported by the “Pathways to Sustainability” funding initiative of the Belmont Forum. 

To bend the curve on biodiversity loss, IIASA researchers are co-producing transformative pathways that are workable and effective in a new EU Horizon funded project. Using the latest modelling tools to understand the impact of worldviews and differing equity principles on biodiversity policy outcomes, we will support stakeholders to produce policy pathways that are just and innovative to improve biodiversity across Europe.

The overall objective of CRiSDA is to support knowledge-based comprehensive climate-risk management (CRM) by developing a participatory process for co-creating and researching essential tools and methodologies towards a drought climate risk service for Austria.

EconTrans takes an innovative integrated approach to address challenges that are deeply interlinked: reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and coping with fundamental transformations triggered by disruptive technologies. The spatial focus of EconTrans is on Austria, while its emissions perspective and policy embedding is globally consistent.

In an interconnected world, Europe’s economy and society will be increasingly affected by climate change impacts that occur beyond its borders. This Horizon 2020 project explores how this will affect Europe’s economy, finance and policy.

Urban metabolism is a model to study the flow of energy and resources as they enter cities, how they are used and consumed, and how they exist cities as wastes. By studying urban metabolism, we can get a better understanding of how resources are used and ways to reduce negative environmental impact. As the fraction of people living in cities continue to expand around the world, urban metabolism analysis can help decision makers develop cities to become resource efficient, climate friendly, resilient and equitable.

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?