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The Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use signed at COP26 represents a commitment by leaders representing over 85% of the world’s forests to halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030. But could the declaration’s ambitions be too ambiguous? An international team of researchers looked into this question.

IIASA recently instituted a new system of awards to recognize outstanding contributions towards meeting the strategic priorities and values of the institute. We are proud to announce that five IIASA research activities have been recognized in the inaugural 2022 award cycle.

This research project funded through the Systems Analysis Forum (SAF) aims to better understand the interaction between labour flows and capital flows in an economy. This work will help to improve the assessment of welfare dynamics and evaluate policies that can lead to higher levels of economic welfare.

The project "Systems analysis of Patterns of COVID-19 spread in Europe and Russia" aims at developing an improved understanding of effectiveness of government policies in limiting the transmission of the COVID-19 virus in the population, and at assessing impacts of relevant socio-economic events on the dynamics of COVID-19 infections.

The increase in emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is only one of several serious global threats to our continued existence on Earth, and their reduction is at the core of international agreements like the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Together with Ukrainian colleagues, IIASA researchers took a novel approach to further the understanding of the planetary burden and its dynamics caused by emissions from human activity.

The frequency and severity of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure is a subject of concern for many governments, as are the costs associated with cyber security, making the efficient allocation of resources paramount. A new study proposes a framework featuring a more holistic picture of the cyber security landscape, along with a model that explicitly represents multiple dimensions of the potential impacts of successful cyber attacks.

Existing national mitigation pledges and commitments place the world on a path well above the climate goal of the landmark Paris Agreement.  Should the world exceed this limit, it is possible to draw down temperature through sustained use of so-called net-negative emissions (i.e., emitting less CO₂ than is taken up by technical and natural processes). RESCUE will expand our current knowledge by exploring the sensitivity of the Earth system to deep mitigation futures which achieve the Paris Agreement goal under different regimes of dependence on net-negative emissions and carbon-dioxide removal.

ESM2025 is an ambitious European project on Earth System Modelling that aims to develop the next generation of Earth System Models (ESMs)

SHELscape is a spatially-explicit agent-based model for understanding short-run post-natural disasters non-linear adjustment processes in a multi-market framework.

A project by researchers from Princeton University and IIASA investigated how different climate scenarios and policy interventions could affect smallholder farmers in Nepal who stand to lose up to a quarter of their income by 2050 due to the effects of climate change.

The third workshop of the Foresight Exercise is organized in the framework of the “Emerging trade routes between Europe and Asia” scenario building project. 

IIASA is proud to announce that 12 researchers from across various IIASA programs have been named on the annual Highly Cited Researchers™ list from Clarivate.

A multidisciplinary consortium of leading European universities, research institutes, companies, NGOs, and practitioners in the field of disaster risk reduction has started a major EU-funded project called MYRIAD-EU to improve our understanding, assessment, and management of disasters caused by combinations of different kinds of natural hazards (e.g. climate, hydrological, geological, and biological hazards).

A project to build a map of the world’s diverse food production systems and their dependencies is helping form a better understanding of the crucial elements and necessary transformative actions that govern agricultural systems, now and in the future.

Asjad Naqvi and Irene Monasterolo discuss a framework they developed to assess how natural disasters cascade across socioeconomic systems.

Climate change may affect the production of maize (corn) and wheat by 2030 if current trends continue, according to a new international study that included researchers from IIASA, NASA, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Maize crop yields are projected to decline by 24%, while wheat could potentially see growth of about 17%.

Sub-Saharan Africa is developing rapidly. With growing economies and increased trade, major road infrastructure plans have been developed for the region, which also hosts some of the world’s most unique and diverse ecosystems. New research looked into how roads might impact ecosystems in the region.

This research project funded through the Systems Analysis Forum (SAF) aims to better understand the interaction between labour flows and capital flows in an economy. This work will help to improve the assessment of welfare dynamics and evaluate policies that can lead to higher levels of economic welfare.

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.