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IIASA researcher suggests a fundamentally different way for governments to plan for the future: using population as a common framework to connect health, education, food, jobs, housing, social protection, and climate risk. The approach integrates demographic data with sectoral planning to help governments make more coordinated, evidence-based decisions and improve population wellbeing.

As Austria experienced record-breaking temperatures on 4 August 2026, with more than 50 weather stations reporting all-time highs, IIASA Director General Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber joined Austrian public radio Ö1's Mittagsjournal to discuss what these extremes mean for the future, as well as why society must prepare for a much hotter climate.

Corporate climate spending now steers trillions of dollars in transition finance worldwide. Does it drive genuine climate action? Research shows that accounting flexibility alone can make a company's reported emissions vary by roughly a factor of two – enough to appear either as a climate leader or a laggard. A new Perspective in Nature Sustainability proposes developing industry-specific net-zero blueprints to close that gap.

Whether planning flood protection, food production, or financial investments, decisions about climate change should be based on an ensemble of projections as they depend on understanding the full range of plausible futures. IIASA researchers and partners have developed an open-source tool that makes it much faster to generate regional climate and impact projections while capturing the uncertainties that shape future climate risks.

Starting this Friday, 31st of July, the Mowing Quest citizen science campaign invites people across Europe to help improve grassland monitoring. By using the free Geo-Quest app, participants can report mowing events directly from the field and support scientific research with their own observations. The campaign will be open during August and September to test the system capabilities in preparation for a larger 2027 campaign.

As populations grow and economies develop, the world will need more roads, railways, and other mobility infrastructure, especially in rapidly urbanizing regions. The challenge is to provide that infrastructure while minimizing resource use and carbon emissions – a goal new research suggests is well within reach.

How do wildfires grow into catastrophic events? By tracing the earliest detectable origins of the devastating 2015 equatorial Southeast Asian fires, researchers found that most large fires had multiple origin points and identified the ecological, climatic, and human factors associated with where fires begin. These findings provide new insights that could help improve fire prevention and understanding of fire risks under climate change across tropical landscapes.

Researchers from the Forest Fire Research Division of the National Institute of Forest Science (NIFoS), Republic of Korea, visited the FLAM team in IIASA’s Agriculture, Forestry and Ecosystem Services (AFE) Group, Biodiversity and Natural Resources (BNR) Program, on 8-9 July 2026 to discuss future collaboration on wildfire modelling, aerial firefighting strategies, and megafire response. 

IIASA researchers contributed to a new international study showing that a combination of healthier diets, improved farm productivity, and reduced food waste could fundamentally reshape global agriculture, substantially reducing pressure on land and greenhouse gas emissions while delivering significant benefits for human health and the environment.

A new Focus Issue has been launched in Environmental Research: Climate on ‘Climate Risks and Socioeconomic Vulnerability’, bringing together Guest Editors from sister projects SPARCCLE, CROSSEU and ACCREU.

IIASA recently welcomed Professor Subra Suresh – Vannevar Bush Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Professor at Large at Brown University, former Director of the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and former President of Carnegie Mellon University and Nanyang Technological University Singapore – for a full day of exchange culminating in a Science Parliament Lecture titled, Innovation 4.0 for Humanity 4.0. 

Farmers, extension workers, and governments now have a powerful new tool to help identify the crops best suited to specific parcels of land, enabling more efficient use of resources and greater resilience to climate change.

Freshwater ecosystems are under growing pressure worldwide, but conservation resources are limited. A framework developed by IIASA researchers and partners can help identify where conservation could prevent biodiversity loss and where restoration efforts are likely to have the greatest ecological impact across the United States and Europe.

Effective sustainable landscape management depends on spatial data that is both high-quality and accessible. To address this need, the Epistem initiative launched Luma (Land Use Mapping for All), a participatory web-based mapping platform, at a national workshop in Jakarta on 20 May 2026.

Students from Lower Austria and Vienna were recognized for their commitment to climate action and received their certificates at IIASA in Laxenburg.

H.E. Ambassador Shambhu S. Kumaran, India's Permanent Representative to the International Organizations in Vienna, recently visited IIASA to explore deeper research cooperation and meet the Institute's Indian Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) cohort.

Tree-Quest is a citizen science mobile tool that enables users to measure aboveground biomass related attributes (tree diameter, height and species) and estimate carbon stored in trees while contributing data for forest and urban tree mapping, supporting research on biomass and carbon storage. Engaged citizens can measure nearby trees in their local surroundings, such as parks and along the streets in urban areas, integrating science into their daily routines. This helps generate valuable ground-based observations on trees in urban environments that can be used for satellite-based carbon assessment. 

As part of the 35th Meeting of the International Resource Panel (IRP), held in Berlin from 8-12 June 2026, CircEUlar and its sister project CIRCOMOD contributed to a dedicated side event for IRP Steering Committee members focused on the role of circular economy measures in greenhouse gas emission mitigation.

A delegation from South Africa's National Research Foundation (NRF) visited IIASA to exchange knowledge on systems approaches to disruptive change, innovation, and evidence-informed decision-making. The visit reflects the longstanding collaboration between IIASA and South Africa.

Under the leadership of IIASA Director General Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber, the Science and Timber Construction Alliance (SITCA) was officially launched today. The initiative aims to transform the construction sector into a driver of climate protection through sustainable forest management and modern timber construction.