Press releases

A new study by an international team of researchers connects drought across the world’s wheat-growing regions with global markets and suggests that 3°C of warming could triple average wheat prices relative to 2010.

How can private gardens help support biodiversity in Austria? The new IIASA citizen science project G/ArtenLeben brings science and gardening practice together. At three G/ArtenCafés in Lower Austria, hobby gardeners are invited to contribute their knowledge and experience to research and work alongside scientists to explore how gardening can help biodiversity thrive.

In a new paper, researchers explain how EU battery regulations can help lay the groundwork for a widely shared evidentiary system for global sustainability governance.

As climate impacts such as heatwaves, floods, and fires are intensifying worldwide, there is an urgent demand for information on how to respond. IIASA researchers and partners have developed a new tool that meets that need, integrating climate drivers, risks, and adaptation options in one framework grounded in IPCC science. It turns authoritative global climate assessments into guidance practitioners can use.

Corporate climate spending now steers trillions of dollars in transition finance worldwide. Does it drive genuine climate action? Research shows that accounting flexibility alone can make a company's reported emissions vary by roughly a factor of two – enough to appear either as a climate leader or a laggard. A new Perspective in Nature Sustainability proposes developing industry-specific net-zero blueprints to close that gap.

Whether planning flood protection, food production, or financial investments, decisions about climate change should be based on an ensemble of projections as they depend on understanding the full range of plausible futures. IIASA researchers and partners have developed an open-source tool that makes it much faster to generate regional climate and impact projections while capturing the uncertainties that shape future climate risks.

As populations grow and economies develop, the world will need more roads, railways, and other mobility infrastructure, especially in rapidly urbanizing regions. The challenge is to provide that infrastructure while minimizing resource use and carbon emissions – a goal new research suggests is well within reach.

How do wildfires grow into catastrophic events? By tracing the earliest detectable origins of the devastating 2015 equatorial Southeast Asian fires, researchers found that most large fires had multiple origin points and identified the ecological, climatic, and human factors associated with where fires begin. These findings provide new insights that could help improve fire prevention and understanding of fire risks under climate change across tropical landscapes.

IIASA researchers contributed to a new international study showing that a combination of healthier diets, improved farm productivity, and reduced food waste could fundamentally reshape global agriculture, substantially reducing pressure on land and greenhouse gas emissions while delivering significant benefits for human health and the environment.