In the cosmos of… Helmut Haberl

My cosmos is a house in Maria Anzbach on the western edge of the Vienna Woods. The beauty of the location and the surrounding garden were important motives for the relocation away from Vienna. I grew up in a rural area in Garsten, Upper Austria. When I turned 40, it dawned on me that I could no longer bear to live in a big city and that I needed to change my residential environment. I bought the house in 2011, together with my sister. It was in a pretty desperate state, and we renovated it from the ground floor to the roof.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

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.

Read more →