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IIASA is proud to announce that its Director General, Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber, has been awarded the prestigious German Cultural Policy Prize 2024. The award, presented by the German Cultural Council, recognizes his exceptional and long-standing contributions to sustainability and climate protection.

A new report, “Browsing Damage - What is Happening in the Forest and What Happens in the Statistics?”, published by the Swedish Forest Agency, provides new insights on the ongoing debate surrounding moose management and its impact on Sweden's forests.  Co-authored by Agriculture, Forestry, and Ecosystem Services (AFE) researcher Oskar Franklin and scientists from Sweden, the report highlights the complex relationship between moose populations, pine tree densities, and browsing damage from both statistical and biological perspectives. 

IIASA researchers contributed to a new World Bank report titled, A Blueprint for Resilience: Charting the Course for Water Security in Europe and Central Asia. This comprehensive publication provides a methodological framework, in-depth analysis, and actionable recommendations to strengthen water security in countries and regions, and build resilience in the face of climate change, rising water demands, and growing geopolitical tensions.

The German Environment Agency (UBA) is adopting the IIASA MESSAGEix framework to build up integrated assessment modeling capacity. The framework is primarily used for analyzing and designing energy systems and their interactions with the economy, the environment, and the society. On 10 December 2024, IIASA Director General, Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber and UBA representatives signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), paving the way for future cooperation.

Join us for an engaging Coffee Chat Series "5 to 12" by the Horizon Europe Community Austria, organized by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). This event brings together experts, including IIASA researcher, Lisa Thalheimer, who will share her insights on "Compound events as amplifiers of climate risks".

IIASA recently hosted an interdisciplinary research workshop under the LowAI project to explore how social media and digital platforms can advance climate and sustainability research. The participants tackled the challenges of leveraging digital data to shape effective climate actions and foster social change. IIASA researcher Sandeep Chowdhary shares his insights and experiences from the event.

In a recent report, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) concluded that Pakistan will require $391 billion to achieve the low-carbon transition by 2050. The report uses the IIASA MESSAGEix framework to analyze the low-carbon transition pathways in Pakistan, the energy sector, the greenhouse gas emissions, and the associated challenges.  

The FRAMEwork project has unveiled its updated knowledge and action platform, Recodo, enhancing its features and design to better serve stakeholders in agrobiodiversity. Developed by researchers in the IIASA Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group and other project partners, Recodo connects and empowers diverse actors and audiences, including Farmer Clusters and other agrobiodiversity stakeholders.

It is our pleasure to announce our upcoming multidisciplinary art/sci symposium taking place on Thursday, 12 December 2024 at IIASA. The event will explore new ways of unleashing the debate around Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and will include the opening of a related art exhibition.

This year, the award is granted to four researchers: Markus Amann, Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer, Sten Nilsson, and Sergei Scherbov, whose pioneering work has not only guided the global political discourse in the fields of demography, climate change, and the environment but also shaped IIASA as the international hub for systems analysis.

The Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) Program will host the fourth MESSAGEix Community Meeting in May 2025. The meeting aims to bring together researchers working on integrated assessment and/or energy system modeling using open source software. 

As global demand for raw materials intensifies due to the material needs of digitalization and decarbonization, the new MINE-THE-GAP project aims to address a critical knowledge gap in mining's environmental and social impacts by creating scalable, reliable mining indicators using advanced satellite data and artificial intelligence (AI).

As part of the A-LEVERS project, experts on climate change met in-person in Vienna to create feasible portfolios of adaptation measures to key climatic risks in Austria

The 29th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29) provided a global stage for advancing carbon farming initiatives in Kazakhstan, a country uniquely positioned to drive nature-based climate solutions in the Asian Drylands Belt (ADB). The side event, titled “Carbon Farming in Kazakhstan: Unlocking the Opportunity,” was held at the QAZAQSTAN Pavilion in Baku, co-organized by IIASA, the BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre, the Center for Applied Research TALAP, and the Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Join us for an engaging seminar, part of the esteemed 10:10 Initiative by Seoul National University (SNU), showcasing cutting-edge research and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. Organized by the SNU Department of Social Welfare and the Department of Sociology, this event brings together experts, including IIASA Population and Just Societies Program Director, Anne Goujon, to discuss critical issues surrounding population dynamics, human capital, and their global implications.

An IIASA delegation consisting of IIASA Director General Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber and IIASA Sherpa for Asia, Wolfgang Lutz, will visit three of the Institute’s Asian member countries, China, South Korea, and Vietnam from 29 November to 8 December 2024.

Earlier this month, the institute welcomed a delegation from the China Population and Development Research Center (CPDRC), a leading population research institution in China. Researchers from the IIASA Population and Just Societies Program (POPJUS) and CPDRC discussed declining fertility rates in China and future cooperation.

A regional to global model designed to simulate and predict the dynamics of water quantity and quality under the influence of various drivers including; climate change, land-use transitions, socio-economic developments, and policy interventions.