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The Cooperative and Transformative Governance (CAT) Research Group contributes to the ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grant project "Building Arctic Futures: Transport Infrastructures and Sustainable Northern Communities" (INFRANORTH) coordinated by the University of Vienna. The project focuses on how residents of the Arctic, both indigenous and non-indigenous, engage with new and upgraded infrastructures in the Arctic and examines the intended and unintended consequences infrastructure projects have on their lives.

The joint project “Integrated modeling for robust management of food-energy-water-land use nexus security and sustainable development” between National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine (NASU), and IIASA for the period from 2022 to 2026 is the continuation and the new stage of the joint NASU-IIASA project “Integrated robust management of food-energy-water-land-social nexus for sustainable development” completed in the period from 2017 to 2021 (IIASA Policy brief, 2017; Zagorodny et al., 2013, 2014, 2018, 2020). In the new research period, we address urgent problems of integrated modeling and policy analysis through models’ linkage and distributed optimization of disintegrated distributed food-water-energy-environmental models, precautionary and adaptive dealing with systemic risks and their implications for Food-Energy-Water-Environmental-Social (FEWES) systems security NEXUS management in Ukraine and globally.

Decades of insufficient action (despite multiple scientific warnings) have heightened risks of irreversible tipping points in the Earth systems. Urgent and critical actions are needed to avert societal collapse. Phase-2 of the Transformations within Reach (TwR) is intended to provide an action-oriented synthesis for catalyzing societal transformations toward sustainability.

Well-being, happiness, quality of life or life satisfaction are the ultimate goals of any human, regardless of status, profession, wealth, religion, or nationality. Governments begin to focus their attention directly on the multidimensional national well-being, including and going beyond economic and material aspects. They look for new under-utilized resources that would raise the national well-being even despite weak economic growth. To discover effective and efficient solutions, one needs to maximize synergies and reduce losses from trade-offs. Systems analysis offers tools to do so.

Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) are invaluable for understanding the biosphere. However, as currently implemented by the international research community, these models suffer from a challenging accumulation of uncertainty. This project aims to address this problem by developing the foundations of a new generation of models centered on a “missing law” – adaptation and optimization principles rooted in natural selection.

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.

The project “Emerging trade routes between Europe and Asia” is conducted at IIASA in 2020-2021 as part of and supported by the Northern Dimension Institute (NDI) Think Tank Action. It engages experts across disciplines and borders into a foresight study to delineate scenarios of plausible alternative futures of shipping in the Arctic as an alternative Europe-Asia transportation option and to facilitate a better understanding by all relevant stakeholders, including decision-makers and the general public, of key uncertainties that are likely to affect the development of the Arctic region, notably, around shipping.

Towards sustainable food and land-use systems: The Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land, and Energy (FABLE) Consortium.

Co-Inform project deals with the phenomena of misinformation and its impact on decision-making processes. Misinformation is a common problem for all media but it is especially exacerbated in the digital social media due to the speed and ease with which it can spread.

The Systemic Risk and Network Dynamics project will examine how different types of systems, ranging from financial to ecological and beyond, are at risk of cascades of failures. As well as assessing this risk, this cross-cutting project will develop tools to help prevent such events.