With the COP Climate conference in Glasgow only a few months away, the ambitions of the Paris Agreement and the importance of taking action at the national level to reach global climate goals is returning to the spotlight. IIASA researchers and colleagues have proposed a novel systematic and independent scenario framework that could help policymakers assess and compare climate policies and long-term strategies across countries to support coordinated global climate action.
A consortium of international scientific unions and scientific organizations’ plans to declare 2022 the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development are underway. Michael Spiro makes the case for why the world needs this now more than at any time in the past.
The farming of livestock to feed the global appetite for animal products greatly contributes to global warming. A new study however shows that emission intensity per unit of animal protein produced from the sector has decreased globally over the past two decades due to greater production efficiency, raising questions around the extent to which methane emissions will change in the future and how we can better manage their negative impacts.
IIASA Director General and CEO Albert van Jaarsveld will attend the Global Forum on Communication in Science - a hybrid event organized by the China Global Television Network (CGTN) and the China Association for Science and Technology, with the goal of strengthening international scientific cooperation between the science community and the world.
IIASA Deputy Director General for Science Leena Srivastava will take part in the Academic Science Section in the first Nobel Prize Summit, which will draw upon lessons learned in the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic to mobilize action on fighting climate change and biodiversity loss, reducing inequality, and advancing technologies with the power to transform the way we live and work.
IIASA Acting Research Group Leader Sebastian Poledna has won a paper competition on the subject of complexity and macroeconomics, organized by the Rebuilding Macroeconomics (RM) Network. The network is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK, and hosted by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), which is the oldest independent economic research institute in the UK.
A new study published in the journal Science, highlights the opportunity to complement current climate mitigation scenarios with scenarios that capture the interdependence among investors’ perception of future climate risk, the credibility of climate policies, and the allocation of investments across low- and high-carbon assets in the economy.
The FRMC was created by the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance in 2013 and is an innovation in community flood resilience theory and practice. It allows users to generate evidence about the ways in which a given area or community is already resilient to floods, as well as providing a guide to further develop this resilience
The way in which banks react to climate risks and uncertainty could impact financial stability as well as the world’s transition to a low-carbon economy. A new study by researchers from IIASA and the Vienna University of Economics and Business explored the role that banks’ expectations about climate-related risks will play in fostering or hindering an orderly low-carbon transition.
The United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, has appointed a new group of ten renowned experts including IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program Director, Keywan Riahi, to support the UN Technology Facilitation Mechanism to bring science into the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).