Article: News
22 May 2023
Bárbara Willaarts and Thomas Schinko join SAPEA (Science Advice for Policy by European Acadamies) for an episode of their Science for Policy Podcast!
They explain why transdisciplinary means more than just collaborating with other areas of science, why co-creation means more than just working with policymakers to understand their needs, and why both are needed to give really good quality policy advice.
Article: News
11 May 2023
When people leave their rural lives behind to seek their fortunes in the city or agriculture is no longer profitable, the lands they toiled on are often left unused. A new perspective piece in Science shows that these abandoned lands could be both an opportunity and a threat for biodiversity, and highlights why abandoned lands are critical in the assessment of global restoration and conservation targets.
Event
IIASA will host the project partners and stakeholders of MOSAIC (Managing protective forests facIng clImate change compound events) for their first project management meeting and technical workshop. The event's aims are to cover issues of climate change data mining and structuring, with a focus on data freely available and its condition of uses; project storage infrastructure; downscaling and upscaling processes; and possible exchanges with relevant networks.
Article: News
10 May 2023
In recent conferences, the FLAM model, developed by researchers Andrey Krasovskiy and Shelby Corning, has captivated audiences with its valuable applications in wildfire dynamics and future projections under climate change scenarios. These presentations, held at renowned conferences and symposiums, have garnered positive feedback and paved the way for potential future collaborations.
Research Project
Climate change (CC) is undeniably responsible for the increase in climate-related disasters affecting Alpine communities. These phenomena are often the result of compound events, a combination of multiple climate-related hazards that contribute to socio-ecological risks. One of the key drivers of the increased vulnerability are changes in forest ecosystems.
Forests provide essential ecosystem services that support human well-being and play a critical role in the mitigation of CC, but their health and stability are also threatened by CC.
Therefore, MOSAIC focuses on hazard-resilient and sustainable protective forest management coping with climate changes’ multiple dimensions, which is essential for managing climate-related risks. In order to support regional and Alpine climate action plans, the project aims to collect, harmonize and share data, models on Alpine climate-related disasters and trends. The project partners strive to raise awareness among foresters, risk managers, decision makers and the public through an Alpine network of forest living labs.
Article: News
09 May 2023
Fungal networks interconnecting trees in a forest is a key factor that determines the nature of forests and their response to climate change. These networks have also been viewed as a means for trees to help their offspring and other tree-friends, according to the increasingly popular “mother-tree hypothesis”. An international group of researchers re-examined the evidence for and against this hypothesis in a new study.
Article: Blog Post
20 April 2023
IIASA researcher Richard Cornford and colleagues discuss the need for urgent action to stop biodiversity declines, and caution that ambitious targets to stop these declines by 2030 may already be slipping out of reach, in an article just published in The Conversation.
Event
Vienna, Austria & online
IIASA researchers will participate in the European Geosciences Union (EGU) 2023 conference presenting research on climate change, risk and resilience, energy, citizen science, and more.
Advancing Systems Analysis (ASA)
Systemic Risk and Resilience (SYRR)
Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability (NODES)
Biodiversity and Natural Resources (BNR)
Biodiversity, Ecology, and Conservation (BEC)
Agriculture, Forestry, and Ecosystem Services (AFE)
Population and Just Societies (POPJUS)
Equity and Justice (EQU)
Research Project
GRANULAR is a project that will last for four years, involving different disciplines and countries, with the aim of creating new datasets, tools, and methods to better understand rural areas. By doing this, we hope to gain new insights into the unique characteristics, dynamics, and drivers of change in rural areas. Using this newly generated and collected knowledge, we aim to help those involved in rural development to design place-based policies that are specifically tailored to the needs of each individual area. Ultimately, GRANULAR hopes to support rural actors in their efforts to promote sustainable territorial development.
Article: News
28 March 2023
IIASA researchers collaborated with the FAIRR Initiative – a collaborative investor network – on the development of a new IPCC-aligned climate risk analysis tool for investors. Analyses done using the new tool, show that climate-related cost increases could significantly affect the bottom lines of the largest listed livestock companies unless new strategies are urgently adopted.
Research Project
To bend the curve on biodiversity loss, IIASA researchers are co-producing transformative pathways that are workable and effective in a new EU Horizon funded project. Using the latest modelling tools to understand the impact of worldviews and differing equity principles on biodiversity policy outcomes, we will support stakeholders to produce policy pathways that are just and innovative to improve biodiversity across Europe.
Research Project
This project estimates the current global treated wastewater irrigation potential and the capacity of wastewater reclamation to function as a climate adaptation measure. GATWIP explores different technological scenarios and technical limitations for treated wastewater irrigation and applies a novel spatially explicit modeling approach to recently published global datasets. GATWIP is funded by a IIASA’s Innovative and Bridging Grant (IBGF).