Environment and Climate Research Hub

Climate Resilience

We investigate how societies and ecosystems can adapt to a changing climate—building resilience through innovation, policy, and community engagement.

Overview | News and Stories | Projects | Publications

Environmental changes require multiscalar responses at the urban, regional, and global level

Anthropogenic climate change manifests in more frequent occurrence of extreme weather events like storms, high-intensity rainfall, and periods of increased temperatures. Crop failures, parasitic invasions, landslides, and floods affect land productivity, livelihood, and food security with severe effects especially in already impoverished regions of the world.

ECH researchers in the focus area dealing with climate resilience investigate the complex nexus of climate change, the environment, socio-economic impacts, and human responses. With a diverse background from natural, human, and social sciences, members research topics around sustainable urban city planning and digitalization as adaptive response strategies, global climate migration, resource extraction and inequality as well as broader economic impacts of regional industries vulnerable to climate change.

News and Stories

Melting Certainties: Ecology and Tourism in the Alps

02.03.2026 ECHO Story

The "Obertauern" skiing region in Austria in winter. Brown hills with artificial snow where the slopes are in between.

Created by Laura Anninger

The Alps are warming rapidly, and winter as we know it is fading. Why are plants, people and the ski industry struggling to adapt? Can artificial snow buy enough time, and what is needed to maintain quality of life in the mountains? Research by ECH members Valentina Ausserladscheider and Stefan Dullinger offers some answers. A story of snowmaking, climate pressures, and cultural lethargy.

From Planetary Diets to Personalised Nutrition

02.03.2026 ECHO Story

Farm fields of different color from above

Created by Nora Gau

We speak with Wolfram Weckwerth, Head of the Molecular Systems Biology lab and the Vienna Metabolomics Center at the University of Vienna, about the EAT-Lancet Report from a biological systems perspective. He reflects on plant diversity, stress resilience, and the limits of yield-driven agriculture - and introduces AIPN, a new research platform that brings together metabolomics, microbiome research, psychology, and AI to translate planetary health diets into data-driven, personalised strategies

Cloud Power: How the Sky Shapes Our Climate

22.07.2025 ECHO Story

Green field with a wooden fence and view of the Vienna skyline under a partly cloudy sky.

Created by Thomas Zauner

Almost every day, we can see clouds in the sky, but rarely we are aware of their wide-ranging impact on the climate. They can both raise and drop temperatures and have complex interactions with the particles in the air. These could even allow us to influence the clouds to fight climate change.

Projects

The Industrial Politics of Carbon Dioxide Removal in the EU (IPOL-CDR)

19.12.2025 Climate Resilience

A chimney that releases exhaust gases into the atmosphere

Led by Etienne Schneider from the Department of Development Studies.

To limit global warming to 1.5° or 2°C, climate change mitigation scenarios indicate the need to deploy durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods at large scale – most prominently bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).

KlipPer: Climate Change and Photovoltaic Energy

22.05.2025 Climate Resilience

Aiko Voigt at the Department for Meteorology and Geophysics is leading the “KlipPer” project.

The central goal of KlipPer is to make the findings and data from climate modeling usable for the design and operation of a resilient PV infrastructure in Austria in a changing climate.

Highreslearn: Extracting Information From High-Resolution Climate Data

22.05.2025 Climate Resilience

Lukas Brunner at the Department of Meteorology and Geophysics is leading the HighResLearn Project.

Funded by the Austrian Climate Research Programme (ACRP) and the Austrian Climate– and Energy Fund, the project develops methods to make the most out of the newest, highly resolved climate simulations.

See all

Publications

2026

Schuster, R. M. V., Gregory, K., Möller, T., & Koesten, L. (2026). Practitioners' Perspectives on Designing Data Visualizations for the General Public. Paper presented at CHI - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2026, Barcelona, Spain. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790627

Boodoo, K., Fasching, C., Chifflard, P., Feld-Golinsk, A., & Foroushani, M. (2026). Extraction method shapes soil water-soluble organic matter composition as revealed by absorbance, fluorescence, and parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC). Scientific Reports (Nature Publisher Group), 16, Article 8488. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41455-w

Keshtgar, B., Hoose, C., & Voigt, A. (2026). Cloud-Radiative Impact on the Dynamics of Extratropical Cyclones during NAWDEX. Monthly Weather Review, 154(3), 369-389. https://doi.org/10.1175/MWR-D-25-0077.1

Busschaert, M., Schagerl, M., Griebler, C., Vermeire, F. H., & Waldherr, S. (2026). Inferring cell division kinetics in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii from flow cytometry with Gaussian process regression. Bioresource Technology, 443, Article 133835. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2025.133835

Koesten, L., Gyarmati, P. F., Hogan, C., Jordan, B., El-Sayed, S., Eitenberger, M., Auer, M., Moller, T., & Prainsack, B. (2026). Pluto: A Public Value Assessment Tool. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 46(2), 43-56. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2025.3649342

Meindl, M., Sabchuk, L., & Voigt, A. (2026). ClimXtract: A Python Toolkit for Standardizing High-Resolution Climate Datasets for Regional Domains. Journal of Open Research Software, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/jors.627

Sullivan, S. C., Voigt, A., Sepúlveda Araya, E., Bucci, S., Miltenberger, A., Kupinski, M. K., Rolf, C., & Krämer, M. (2026). Evaluation of upper-tropospheric lower-stratospheric properties over the Asian monsoon region in a storm-resolving model. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 26(3), 1685-1698. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-26-1685-2026

Brack, G., Dütsch, M., & Stohl, A. (2026). A New Climatology of Continentality Based on Lagrangian Air Mass Travel Times From the Ocean. Geophysical Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL120627

Webb, R. P., Costa, C., Palitsin, V., Colaux, J. L., Stuart, F. M., Hain, K., Merchel, S., & Steier, P. (2026). On the analysis of lead objects in an attempt to determine their age. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms, 570, Article 165947. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nimb.2025.165947

Saske, A., Koesten, L., Möller, T., Staudner, J., & Kritzinger, S. (2026). A Multidimensional Assessment Method for Visualization Understanding (MdamV). IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2026.3653265

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