Event
Gvishiani Room, IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria
We are pleased to announce the upcoming Korea University-IIASA symposium titled, Towards integrated approaches for modeling ecosystem material cycles and climate crisis-related disturbances, which will be hosted at IIASA on the margins of the 2024 European Geosciences Union (EGU) conference.
Article: Blog Post
11 April 2024
The way we do science has come a long way—from having only experts work on scientific projects, to where many projects now also include members of the public as participants. This change is thanks to citizen science, which creates opportunities for science to be taken to the next level.
Event
Virtual (via Zoom)
This virtual summer school guides the application of the water resources and hydrological model CWatM (Community Water Model). Participants will run CWatM for a large basin, describe its water cycle, compare with satellite imagery, and calibrate the model. Successful assignments award a CWatM Level A1 certification.
IIASA is offering half-day workshops for individual school classes on a topic in systems thinking. Each workshop is focusing on a specific topic in systems thinking, with well-defined learning objectives and will have interactive activities based on real situations and the challenge of solving specific tasks during the practical part of the sessions.
At IIASA we believe that thinking in systems is a skill that is essential for dealing with today’s and tomorrow’s complex challenges. We also believe that future leaders need to acquire systems thinking skills as early as possible. Therefore, we not only train graduate and postgraduate students, PhD candidates, postdocs, and professionals but also bring systems thinking to the kids and teenagers at schools to develop relevant skills at a point where young people start to think fundamentally about the complexity of the natural and social world they live in.
Article: Other
09 April 2024
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.
Research Project
The Global Shield initiative, a collaboration between the G7 and V20, aims to revolutionize Climate and Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance (CDRFI) support. Led by Germany in 2022, it focuses on enhancing pre-arranged finance, country ownership, and evidence-based gap analysis. The Global Shield Solutions Platform (GSSP) provides technical assistance and financial support to countries, addressing protection gaps through risk assessments and capacity development.
Event
Riga, Latvia
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.
Event
Beijing, China
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.
Event
Brussels, Belgium
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.
Article: News
02 April 2024
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.
Research Project
Natural and man-made disasters are causing huge losses, which are likely to rise due to the risk ignorance, population and development growth in disaster-prone areas, as well as interdependencies among sectors, regions, locations, increasing current and future exposure and vulnerability. The interdependencies among systems and regions involve interactions between socio-economic, natural, technological systems. They resemble complex networks connected through various “balance” relations (supply-demand, input-output, inflow-outflow) at different levels. Disruption of such networks can trigger systemic risks associated with critical imbalances, exceedances of vital thresholds, which affect provision of goods (food, energy, water), environmental norms, endanger population and developments, thus undermining socio-economic-food-energy-water NEXUS security (SEFEW NEXUS security) at local, regional, national levels with possible global spillovers.
Co-development of integrated and multi-disciplinary advanced system analyses and decision support methods and tools is essential for stakeholders and experts to build up regional resilience through timely investments into disaster preparedness and response measures enabling to properly mitigate and adapt to systemic risks of all kinds.