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The 2024 Highly Cited Researchers™ list by Clarivate celebrates individuals whose research has had a profound and wide-reaching impact. IIASA is proud to have its Director General, Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber, as well as 10 additional exceptional researchers associated with the Institute recognized for their contributions in various fields.

On October 22, the SHAW group within the POPJUS program at IIASA hosted a one-day workshop, bringing together 30-40 researchers from various programs to collaborate and advance research in the field of health and wellbeing.

The Citizens4Copernicus (C4C) project consortium held its first annual meeting in Vienna, where partners reviewed key achievements, including the development of methods for tree attribute extraction and the creation of a prototype app for citizen science data collection. The project is now entering the data collection phase, focusing on forest and tree mapping through citizen science campaigns, while planning additional measurement campaigns and further app enhancements.

New work by IIASA and the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) leverages developments in climate science, economics and climate policy to bolster evidence for the rationale and funding needs associated with Loss and Damage and to inform international negotiations, including on the operationalization of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), the launch of the High Level Dialogue on complementarity and coherence, and discussions around Loss and Damage in the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQF).

IIASA researchers provide over one hundred central banks all over the world with scenarios that help them make the financial sector more resilient to climate change. The scenarios have recently been updated to reflect advances in climate policies and assess risks more comprehensively. This work was conducted by a scientific consortium to support the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS).

During the Seventeenth IAMC Annual Meeting, held online 4-6 November, the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium was proud to honor Marina Andrijevic (IIASA) with the Early Career Researcher Award for her contributions to the socioeconomic dimension of integrated assessment modeling, including her recent work on adaptive capacity.

IIASA scientists show that preserving ecosystems and fostering socioeconomic development is not a trade-off. On the contrary, an integrated approach is beneficial to national policies. We share examples from India, Brazil, and Indonesia.

The SPARCCLE consortium gathered at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) from 8th to 10th October for an in-person meeting and workshops, celebrating a year of progress and planning for the next phases. The three-day event brought together consortium members from across nine countries, as well as the project’s esteemed Stakeholder Advisory Board members.

IIASA made contributions to the Computational Social Science Conference, held on October 28-29, 2024 at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona. Co-organized by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, CODATA, and “la Caixa” Foundation, the conference brought together over 160 participants, including top researchers, data specialists, and infrastructure experts, to explore cutting-edge methods, novel insights, data workflows, and data stewardship in computational social science.

New research reveals a strong link between higher female education and lower fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa. Educated women are driving a shift toward smaller families and even influencing less educated peers. This new forecasting model offers policymakers valuable insights into how women's education shapes population trends, aiding sustainable development efforts.

The Amazon forest stores large quantities of the climate-damaging greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂). But deforestation, agriculture and rising temperatures bring this nature based solution to a limit. AmazonFACE brings together an international team of researchers aiming to address the question how the Amazon forest will respond to projected future CO₂ concentrations. By using Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) technology we will generate process based understanding on the functioning of the world’s largest tropical rainforest, and therefore will be able to inform regional policies on climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Sustainable lifestyles, green-tech innovation, and government-led transformation each offer promising routes to make significant progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement, according to a new study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), to which IIASA scientists contributed. Contrary to the belief that the path to sustainable development is increasingly out of reach, the results show that humankind has a variety of pathways to depart from its current unsustainable trajectory.

The MEDiate project is designed to help policymakers in decisions on natural disaster risk reduction. This year’s general assembly was held on 24 and 25 October. During this event, IIASA’s CAT team in the project held a serious-game workshop for finding sustainable solutions to natural hazard risk reduction. The workshop guided the participants trough silent negotiation to find a risk reduction solution for city-wide disaster scenarios.

Governments worldwide must urgently commit to reducing annual greenhouse gas emissions by 42% by 2030 and 57% by 2035 in their next Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to avoid surpassing the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C global warming target, warns a new report released by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) today.

IIASA researchers helped to identify three focus areas at the intersection of science and policy, which could foster transformative action to accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Their priorities include exploiting SDG synergies, modeling long-term policy impacts, and co-developing tools together with relevant stakeholders.

MEDiate hosted a discussion panel, examining different theoretical and practical aspects of reducing the risk of natural hazards while taking into account the interaction among multiple hazards and ever-changing environmental and climatic conditions. In this discussion, CAT research group leader Nadejda Komendantova was invited to share her insights on cooperative policymaking for finding sustainable risk reduction solutions. 

The influence of climate change on migration, both current and future, has garnered significant attention from the public and policymakers over the past decade. A new IIASA-led study has provided the first comprehensive analysis of how climate factors – specifically drought and aridity – affect internal migration.

Over the past decades, researchers have revealed different dimensions of natural disaster risk with great dedication. This diversity in risk dimensions can cause conflict of opinions and interests and calls for a collaborative approach to finding the solution. This year’s Disaster Research Days focused on disaster risk reduction and invited IIASA’s CAT research group leader, Nadejda Komendantova, to share the approach they developed in the MEDiate project.

Following his keynote address at the Austrian Wind Energy Association (AWES), IIASA Director General Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber spoke to the industry magazine Windenergie about why we need to step up current climate policy and what climate protection has to do with patriotism.

In the light of new technologies and their serious impact on societies and the environment, and in the rise of global changes in natural hazards, the need for cooperation and shared understanding for shaping the future of disaster risk reduction has become clearer than ever. This year’s Disaster Research Days events are more focused on this goal, and IIASA's Cooperation and Transformative Governance Research Group leader, Nadejda Komendantova, was invited to share her innovative insights.