Leila Niamir
Research Scholar
Transformative Institutional and Social Solutions Research Group
Energy, Climate, and Environment Program
Research Scholar
Sustainable Service Systems Research Group
Energy, Climate, and Environment Program
Biography
Leila Niamir is a research scholar in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) Program. She is a computational economist working on energy demand and climate change mitigation. Her research focuses on cities and the built environment, behavioral and lifestyle changes, human wellbeing, and agent-based modeling.Currently, she is leading the Urban Futures Hub, a pioneering research initiative dedicated to studying cities and their role in climate change.
She has served as an author on several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports. She was a lead author of the Summary for Policymakers and the Technical Summary, and a chapter scientist of Chapter 5: Demand, services, and social aspects of mitigation in Climate Change 2022. In addition, she contributed to the Synthesis Report of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report and the Summary for Urban Policymakers as an author of volume III.
She received her doctoral degree from the University of Twente in The Netherlands on Behavioral Climate Change Mitigation in 2019 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MCC Berlin, Germany from 2019 to 2022.
She is passionate about promoting science for society and actively works on the science-policy-society interface. She is an elect-member of the Global Young Academy (GYA), 2020-2025, as well as the Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership founded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung, 2021-2023.
Last update: 28 JUN 2024
Publications
Niamir, L. & Creutzig, F. (2025). Closing the gap: Integrating behavioral and social dynamics through a modular modelling framework for low-energy demand pathways. Energy Research & Social Science 122 e103988. 10.1016/j.erss.2025.103988.
Pettifor, H., Agnew, M., Wilson, C. , & Niamir, L. (2024). Disentangling the carbon emissions impact of digital consumer innovations. Journal of Cleaner Production 485 e144412. 10.1016/j.jclepro.2024.144412.
Chatterjee, S., Mastrucci, A. , Niamir, L. , Ashok, K., Sreenivas, A., Dukkipati, S., Daioglou, V., Edelenbosch, O., Pelz, S., Boza-Kiss, B. , Kumar, P., & Ürge-Vorsatz, D. (2024). Balancing energy transition: Assessing decent living standards and future energy demand in the Global South. Energy Research & Social Science 118 e103757. 10.1016/j.erss.2024.103757.
Niamir, L. & Weber, E.U. (2024). What Can We Do About the Climate Crisis? Frontiers for Young Minds 12 e1421602. 10.3389/frym.2024.1421602.
Wiedenhofer, D., Streeck, J., Wiese, F., Verdolini, E., Mastrucci, A. , Ju, Y. , Boza-Kiss, B. , Min, J. , Norman, J.B., Wieland, H., Bento, N., Godoy León, M.F., Magalar, L., Mayer, A., Gingrich, S., Hayashi, A., Jupesta, J., Ünlü, G. , Niamir, L. , Cao, T., Zanon-Zotin, M., Plank, B., Vélez-Henao, J., Masanet, E., Krey, V. , Akimoto, K., Grubler, A. , van Ruijven, B. , & Pauliuk, S. (2024). Industry Transformations for High Service Provisioning with Lower Energy and Material Demand: A Review of Models and Scenarios. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 49 249-279. 10.1146/annurev-environ-110822-044428.