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

This project aims to develop new indicators for long-term human wellbeing that include feedbacks from environmental and other changes. It is funded through an ERC Advanced Grant awarded to Wolfgang Lutz.

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.

The project will focus on understanding the patterns, motivations and modalities of migration at multiple geographical scales, from international through regional to the local, and on imagining possible futures.

The overarching aim of this project is to produce comprehensive, multi-perspective and robust quantitative migration scenarios to support various areas of European migration policy, based on the cutting-edge developments in conceptualising, explaining, estimating and forecasting migration.

Applying demographic concepts and methodological tools, researchers at IIASA Population and Just Societies Program (POPJUS) in collaboration with Wittgenstein Centre researchers, international collaborators and stakeholders have been working on different projects looking at the vulnerability dimension and differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

This project aims to develop tools that provide policymakers with fair normal pension ages and consistently up-to-date measures of population ageing that consider the changing characteristics of populations.

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.

BALANCE will develop a strategic tool for decision making that enable policy makers to evaluate alternative strategies for a circular bioeconomy in terms of the goals of value creation and employment, greenhouse gas emission reduction, and resource efficiency.

'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.

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.

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).

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.

Unanticipated migration inflows can have positive and negative economic and social consequences depending on policies implemented by the recipient country to cope with the manifold challenges. Model-based scientific assessments of in-migration on a country's national economy are hence needed, as is meaningful stakeholder deliberation of alternative policies to support the integration of refugees in ways that contribute to resilient and sustainable societies.