Article: News
03 June 2022
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.
Article: News
30 May 2022
With the rapid reduction in the costs of renewable energy generation, such as wind and solar power, there is a growing need for energy storage technologies to make sure that electricity supply and demand are balanced properly. IIASA researchers have come up with a new energy storage concept that could turn tall buildings into batteries to improve the power quality in urban settings.
Event
Laxenburg
IIASA and RITE co-organized an expert meeting in the framework of the Energy Demand changes Induced by Technological and Social innovations (EDITS) network to further the interdisciplinary dialogue in conceptualizing, analyzing, policy making, and modeling of energy demand and its interlinkages to climate change mitigation and the SDGs.
Article: News
03 May 2022
Researchers from the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program found that agricultural efforts in downstream countries in Central Asia, traditionally hampered by a lack of water for irrigation during the summer growing season, would be significantly boosted with a “dual water and energy storage scheme”, which also paves the way for high shares of renewable energy generation in the region.
Event
Online by invitation
IIASA lead authors from Working Groups II and III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report will present the main findings at an event co-organized with the Climate Change Center Austria, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The event will take place in German.
Article: News
21 April 2022
There is an increasing awareness in the scientific community that open-source scientific software is an integral requirement for open science, increasing transparency, and the reproducibility of research findings. Two manuscripts by IIASA researchers presenting state-of-the-art developments furthering these goals were recently recognized by the scientific journals where these works were published.
Article: News
06 April 2022
Between 2010 and 2019, average annual global greenhouse gas emissions were at their highest levels in human history, but the rate of growth has slowed. Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C is beyond reach. However, there is increasing evidence of the success of climate action, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
Article: News
04 April 2022
IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program Director Keywan Riahi and Joeri Rogelj, a senior researcher at the institute, have been appointed to the new European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change. This new independent advisory body will provide scientific advice to underpin climate action and efforts by the European Union (EU) to reach climate neutrality by 2050.
Event
Vienna, Austria and online
IIASA researchers will participate in the European Geosciences Union (EGU) 2022 conference presenting research on climate change, risk and resilience, energy, citizen science, and more.
Cooperation and Transformative Governance (CAT)
Systemic Risk and Resilience (SYRR)
Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability (NODES)
Agriculture, Forestry, and Ecosystem Services (AFE)
Sustainable Service Systems (S3)
Integrated Assessment and Climate Change (IACC)
Transformative Institutional and Social Solutions (TISS)
Research Project
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.
Tool
The concept of nexus thinking has gained traction amongst the applied research community to examine cross-sector linkages between land, water, and energy strategies. A nexus approach identifies the interactions among sectors to better understand the synergies and trade-offs involved in meeting future resource demands in a sustainable way.
Research Project
While Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been introduced by The UN 2030 Agenda, unfortunately we as a planet are not currently on course. In addition, protection of the Earth's climate promoted by the Paris Agreement is also not on track. IIASA plans to join Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and several other partners to contribute to SHAPE, which will aim to study Sustainable Development Pathways (SDPs) that will achieve the SDGS in 2030 and also support sustainable development reach the goals of the Paris Agreement in 2100.
Dataset
The CD-LINKS consortium has developed a set of consistent national and global low-carbon development pathways that take current national policies and the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) as an entry point for short-term climate action and then transition to long-term goals of 1.5 and 2°C as defined by the Paris Agreement.