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Ukraine’s forest sector is suffering unprecedented challenges. War has impacted both forests and forestry – devastating forest areas, infrastructure and industry, as well as causing ‘brain drain’ and capacity loss due to the disruption of research institutions and the displacement of students and scientists. These impacts are compounded by factors including climate change, unstable forest health dynamics, landscape fires, and an overall decrease in forest productivity.

On the occasion of the scoping meeting in Riga, Latvia, for the Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, to be included in the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), collaborators of the EU CLIMAAX project and IPCC colleagues are holding a workshop to discuss advances in climate risk science and stakeholder needs for urban resilience.  

A new study led by Jarmo Kikstra, a research scholar in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program, explores whether reducing production and consumption growth could make a significant contribution to resolving the climate crisis.

IIASA and Beijing Normal University are co-organizing a symposium titled, The International Symposium on Polycrises and Systemic risks: The need for an integrative approach for assessment and governance. The event will take place in Beijing, China from 9 to 10 May 2024. IIASA Interim Deputy Director General for Science, Wolfgang Lutz, and IIASA Research Group Leader, Reinhard Mechler, will participate in the event to bring together different communities of risk and hazard research, explore their commonalities, and discuss improved policy options for dealing more effectively with systemic risks in the future.

IIASA Director General, John Schellnhuber, will be an invited speaker at the upcoming New European Bauhaus Festival in Brussels and participate in important conversations concerning the European Green Deal and the imperative of sustainable construction as part of a pathway toward a more sustainable future.

Around 50 students from the bilingual school Draschestrasse in Vienna, accompanied by their teachers, will visit IIASA next week.

In February 2024, a new EU-funded project kicked off. CROPS – short for curating, replicating, orchestrating, and propagating citizen science across Europe – is a three-year project that brings together six partners from six different countries to develop and demonstrate a modern, inclusive mechanism to support the upscaling of citizen science activities in Europe and beyond.

IIASA Director General John Schellnhuber in an interview with German news magazine Stern.

As the world marks the International Day of Zero Waste, Adriana Gómez-Sanabria highlights that the path to zero waste will require a shift in society’s current consumption and production patterns. Originally conceived to shield humanity and the environment from the fallout of our actions, waste management systems must now evolve into engines of sustainability.

A new report, outlining the key priorities and recommended actions for the Ukrainian forest sector, was launched earlier this week. The report summarizes the key recommendations and takeaways from the Forum on Ukraine Forest Science and Education: Needs and Priorities for Collaboration, organized by IIASA and partners in November 2023.

This application serves as an expansion of the Bayesian Reconstruction of Populations and Vital Rates by Educational Attainment (BayesEdu) project. Its objective is to integrate existing demographic data to generate accurate estimates of population sizes and vital rates categorized by educational attainment, while also considering associated uncertainties.

Join us for this webinar series that aims to advance the knowledge about tipping elements, irreversibility, and abrupt changes in the Earth system. In this installment, experts will delve into the critical tipping points in soil erosion and their implications, particularly in the regions of the Global South where the impacts are currently most pronounced.

The US Committee for IIASA of the National Academy of Sciences will host an online information session on Friday, 5 April 2024 for individuals interested in applying to attend IIASA’s inaugural Summer School on Systems Modeling. 

In Bangladesh, annual flooding affects millions of people, particularly those in rural riverine communities. These communities have developed resilience strategies over generations to cope with flooding and erosion, but with increasing hazards and land pressures, the effectiveness of these strategies is uncertain. A recent study evaluated the resilience of 35 such communities in the country.