Climate change, demographics and health – challenges for the future

Willi Haas talked to ad astra about his research results.

The researcher Willi Haas investigates the consequences of climate change for our health, while considering demographic change. He calculates how susceptible our society is with regard to certain adverse consequences of climate change and explores which adaptation measures and options are available to mitigate against these impacts. Early projections for Austria indicate that – provided that no supplementary adaption measures are introduced – around the years 2030 and 2050 there will be roughly 3,000 additional deaths each year simply due to heat waves. Given unfavourable development scenarios and in unfavourable years, this figure may even increase threefold. Leading up to the UN Climate Conference COP in 2018, an assessment report for Austria coordinated by Haas aims to evaluate the current position relating to the topic of health, demographics and climate change.

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When forests regrow: ERC Starting Grant for sustainability researcher Simone Gingrich

In many industrialised countries, forests are starting to regrow after centuries or millennia of large-scale deforestation. This appears positive for the global climate system, because forests sequester carbon that would otherwise accumulate in the atmosphere. However, forest regrowth may not necessarily be a viable strategy for climate-change mitigation. Simone Gingrich has been awarded a prestigious ERC Starting Grant and plans to use it to identify and analyse the “hidden emissions” of reforestation processes.

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Current insights into social ecology: special issue of the journal ‚Sustainability‘ published

In the last decades social ecology has made important contributions to sustainability research. As the science of societal relationship to nature it evolved in the late 1980s. Today, the approach that understands complex environmental problems to be rooted in the critical relationship between society and nature is regarded to be fundamental for research dealing with sustainable development. Now, with a special issue of the renowned international journal ‘Sustainability’ a comprehensive insight is given to the state of the art of social-ecological research.

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On the outrage over how one single species treats the other species

How many species will remain, if we use land in a certain way and climate change continues to progress? Iwona Dullinger addresses this question in her research for her doctoral thesis at the  Institute of Social Ecology. We now know that land use and climate change are the two main drivers of biodiversity loss. Yet, to date, research has rarely considered them jointly. Dullinger hopes to close this research gap.

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