Page - 3 - in options, Volume summer 2021

ADVANCING THE SCIENCE OF CITIZEN SCIENCE A SAFE AND JUST FUTURE FOR PEOPLE AND PLANET A new book featuring contributions by IIASA researchers Dilek Fraisl and Linda See, brings together the views and perspectives of researchers and practitioners from various disciplines spanning the humanities to the natural sciences, to offer practical support for implementing citizen science projects and address important current and emerging topics in fields like citizen science and artificial intelligence. www.iiasa.ac.at/news/21-citizen-science IIASA is supporting the Earth Commission through assessment and modeling of safe and just development pathways for people and the planet by integrating complex interlinkages and feedbacks among Earth and human systems. The work answers the clarion call from businesses and cities for putting science behind the setting of targets for the global commons and crucial Earth systems to safeguard Earth’s resilience. www.iiasa.ac.at/news/21-future News in brief Measuring sustainable wellbeing Life expectancy has long been used as an extensive indicator of human development, with avoiding premature death being a universally shared aspiration. However, according to a group of researchers led by Senior IIASA Population and Just Societies Program Advisor, Wolfgang Lutz, mere survival is not enough to enjoy life and its qualities. To overcome the lack of benchmarks of objective and subjective wellbeing in existing indicators, Lutz and his colleagues propose a new, tailor-made metric that measures development based on long-term human wellbeing: The Years of Good Life (YoGL) indicator. YoGL only counts a year as a good year if individuals are simultaneously not living in absolute poverty, are free from cognitive and physical limitations, and report to be generally satisfied with their lives. The researchers say their work presents a first step in the great challenge to comprehensively assess sustainable human wellbeing that also considers feedbacks from environmental change. Unlike many other indicators, YoGL is not restricted to the national level but can be assessed for flexibly defined sub-populations and over long-time horizons. It also has the potential to become a broadly used “currency” for measuring the benefits of certain actions, thus complementing assessments based on purely monetary units. The social costs of carbon could, for instance, potentially be evaluated in terms of years of good life lost among future generations, making it a key indicator to measure sustainable progress in an integrated and tangible way. When applied to the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers note that YoGL represents a major improvement over conventional indicators in assessing the long-term success of intervention measures, as it not only accounts for material losses and lost life years, but also for the losses in physical and cognitive wellbeing and those incurred by younger generations due to lockdown measures like school closures. Further info: pure.iiasa.ac.at/17111 Wolfgang Lutz: lutz@iiasa.ac.at By Ansa Heyl A NEW FRAMEWORK TO IMPROVE CLIMATE MITIGATION SCENARIOS IIASA researchers and colleagues at the RFF- CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment have developed a systematic framework that allows identifying the type, timing, and location of feasibility concerns raised by climate mitigation scenarios to help understand what to improve in the next generation of scenarios and explore how to make ambitious emission reductions possible by strengthening enabling conditions. www.iiasa.ac.at/news/21-pathways Years of Good Life Positive life satisfaction Capable longevity 3Optionswww.iiasa.ac.at Summer 2021