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Until recently, most competition authorities have prioritized consumer welfare and efficiency in their approach to regulate industry markets. However, the multisided nature of the platform economy means that monitoring of markets must consider not just consumer welfare, but also the welfare of complementors, third parties, and all participants of digital platform ecosystems (DPE) in the short and long term.

A person using digital communication leaves behind a trail of information on their activities, their interactions, and even some about who they are. Social media has become quintessential to the modern lives of billions of people which means that billions of trails are recorded on social media and communications platforms. This data has come to be a treasure trove of aggregated information which scientists can use to decipher the most unique trends and behaviors on a societal level. As part of her ongoing research at ASA, Elena Rovenskaya presented on the significance of social media as a source of information for science and its usefulness in understanding complex systems behaviors.

On 25th and 26th of April 2023, IIASA researchers Elena Rovenskaya and Pratik Patil participated as panelists in the EGU conference, which brings together geoscientists from all over the world to discuss latest research on geosciences, climate change, risk and resilience, energy, citizen science, and more. Their contributions were based on their research as part of the Transformations within Reach project at the IIASA

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) develop long-term mitigation scenarios which play an essential role in the development of IPCC reports. These models, however, have been criticized for proposing solutions that are challenging to carry out due to a lack of consideration of social and institutional challenges. In the paper "A multidimensional feasibility evaluation of low-carbon scenarios by person" (Brutschin, et al., 2021), scientists proposed a versatile, multidimensional framework that allows for comparisons between decarbonization pathways by quantifying feasibility concerns. This online, interactive tool was developed to complement this paper and allows the user to examine this framework in more detail.

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) Extensions Explorer is a tool for visualizing and downloading quantitative elaborations of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), which emerged in the literature since the publication of the original set (e.g., GDP, population) of SSP-related indicators. The tool hosts scenarios of indicators such as Gender Inequality Index, Governance, Rule of Law, Human Development Index, and Migration Flows.

The Fair Mitigation Finance Explorer is the web app accompanying the paper 'Fairness considerations in global mitigation investments'. Users can select various indicators with a variety of weights to explore the ‘fair’ regional contributions to near-term regional mitigation investment needs. With this information, the web app determines the ‘fair-share’ regional contributions to their respective regional ‘cost-effective’ investment needs.

Researchers from the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) visited IIASA on 24 April to finalize a five-year collaboration on nature-based solutions for meeting climate and biodiversity targets, and to plan a proposal to continue their collaboration.

A list of publications written by IIASA Postdoctoral Schorals.

The green hydrogen economy is a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. However, one of the challenges of constructing a global hydrogen economy is hydrogen transportation by sea. A new paper proposes solid air as a medium for recycling cold energy across the hydrogen liquefaction supply chain.

IIASA Cooperation and Transformative Governance Research Group Leader, Nadejda Komendantova, has been appointed as an independent expert on the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Foresight Expert Panel established in cooperation with the International Science Council (ISC).

IIASA Interim Deputy Director General for Science, Wolfgang Lutz, has been appointed as a Special Adviser to Dubravka Šuica, the European Commission Vice President for Democracy and Demography, starting in April 2023.

IIASA researchers present results from the WaterStressAT project at the Renexpo Interhydro Conference in Salzburg.

The 8th Viennese Vintage Workshop on "Heterogeneous Dynamic Models of Economic and Population Systems" is held in November 2023 at IIASA for the first time in its history.

With increasing temperatures caused by climate change, air conditioning is becoming a necessity for people’s comfort and health. A new study provides insight into consumers’ interest in home cooling by analyzing social media data, and addresses data gaps in demographic heterogeneity of global air conditioner adoption.

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.  

IIASA Director General Albert van Jaarsveld attended the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) joint Council and Program Directors' meeting on 17 April and a symposium on misinformation from 18-19 April as part of the CIFAR Research Council.