GLOBIOM IIASA Newsletter — 2025 Highlights
Dear GLOBIOM Community,
We are pleased to share the latest edition of the GLOBIOM newsletter, bringing together recent highlights from the IIASA team and the wider community. This update provides a concise overview of key research outputs, policy contributions, upcoming activities, and opportunities for engagement.
Looking back at 2025, it has been a year of continued progress, with important advances in research, contributions to policy discussions, and recognition of achievements across the community. The sections below summarise some of the most notable developments.
Best regards, The GLOBIOM Community Coordination Team
Research highlights
The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems
Rockström, J., Thilsted, S. H., Willett, W. C., et al. — The Lancet
Led by Marta Kozicka, GLOBIOM team contributed the new 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems. The Commission presents new evidence-based insights on nutrition and human health, within safe and just planetary boundaries. New to this Commission are updates to the planetary health diet, measurement and assessment of the impact food systems have in driving transgressions of planetary boundaries, an exploration of multi-dimensional and underlying issues of food justice, new research and extensive modelling insights, and transformative and action-based recommendations and roadmaps. The study received strong visibility, ranking among the most talked-about climate-related papers (#5) in Carbon Brief’s 2025 list.
Bundling measures for food systems transformation: a global, multimodel assessment
Sundiang, M., Diniz Oliveira, T., Mason-D’Croz, D., et al. — The Lancet Planetary Health
GLOBIOM contributed to this multi-model analysis to explore how coordinated sets of policy measures can unlock transformational pathways for food systems that balance health, sustainability, and equity. This work demonstrates that integrated bundles of food system policies can achieve more systemic change than isolated measures.
Feeding The Planet While Saving It: How New Foods Can Help!
Kozicka, M., Leclère, D., Davis, C., et al. — Frontiers for Young Minds
Last year’s research by Kozicka et al. was invited to be adapted for publication in Frontiers for Young Minds, an open-access scientific journal that brings research directly to young readers aged 8–15. The article translates findings on sustainable diets and innovative food alternatives into an accessible format for school students, helping to communicate how food system transformation can contribute to climate mitigation and biodiversity protection.
Complexity and uncertainty in future food system transformation modelling
Moallemi, E. A., Castonguay, A. C., Mason-D’Croz, D., et al. — Nature Food
The GLOBIOM-Australia team led a review article in Nature Food. The article provides an original synthesis that uncovers a fundamental mismatch between the complexity of food-system transitions and the simplifying assumptions of current models. By exposing these structural limitations, the study explains why many existing economic models often fail to produce policy-relevant scenarios for sustainable transformation.
Adapting forest management to climate change impacts and policy targets in the EU: Insights from the coupled GLOBIOM/G4M-i3PGmiX model
Augustynczik, A. L. D., Gusti, M., Deppermann, A., et al. — One Earth
This study applies the coupled GLOBIOM/G4M-i3PGmiX framework to assess how forest management in the EU must adapt to meet climate mitigation, biodiversity, and bioeconomy targets under changing climatic conditions. Results indicate that climate policy will shape management decisions until mid-century, while climate impacts increasingly drive regional shifts in productivity and harvest patterns thereafter, highlighting the need for adaptive strategies to balance carbon sequestration, biomass supply, and ecosystem resilience.
Global carbon storage in harvested wood products: a forest sector model inter-comparison
Fuller, M., Baker, J., Daigneault, A., et al. — Environmental Research Letters
Assesses the role of harvested wood products (HWPs) in climate mitigation using a multi-model comparison of global forest sector models across different socioeconomic and policy scenarios. The results highlight key trade-offs between carbon storage in forests, wood products, and bioenergy systems, showing that policy ambition and carbon capture technologies strongly influence the contribution of forests and wood-based products to long-term carbon sequestration.
Global forest carbon leakage and substitution effect potentials: The case of the Swedish forest sector
Schulte, M., Lauri, P., Di Fulvio, F., et al. — Journal of Environmental Management
Examines the global climate impacts of changes in forest harvesting, accounting for market-mediated leakage and substitution effects using a global modelling framework. The results show that reduced harvesting can deliver net climate benefits despite leakage, while increased harvest levels may lead to higher global emissions, highlighting the importance of coordinated forest and climate policies.
Impact of the EU biodiversity strategy for 2030 on the EU wood-based bioeconomy
Di Fulvio, F., Snäll, T., Lauri, P., et al. — Global Environmental Change
Assesses how climate risks and adaptation responses influence economic and environmental outcomes across sectors using an integrated modelling framework. The study highlights how adaptation strategies can reduce damages but also introduce trade-offs across regions and sectors, emphasizing the importance of coordinated policies to manage climate risks under different socioeconomic pathways.
Policy contributions and community engagement
GLOBIOM contributed to the environmental chapters of the OECD Agricultural Outlook by providing marginal abatement cost curves integrated into the Aglink-COSIMO model. These curves allow to represent AFOLU mitigation potentials from technical and structural options, enabling quantification of different cost-effective emission reduction potentials within the Outlook framework. The GLOBIOM team also contributed to DG AGRI workshops linked to the EU Agricultural Outlook.
Havlík, P., van Meijl, H., et al.
This inter-project collaboration coordinated by Petr Havlík and Hans van Meijl (Wageningen University and Research) brought together researchers and policy analysts from 15 countries to examine how agriculture and agricultural research can strengthen the EU bioeconomy, enhance competitiveness, and support long-term economic resilience. By combining modelling expertise and policy analysis from the ACT4CAP27, BrightSpace, and LAMASUS Horizon Europe projects, the initiative provided a joint economic perspective on the role of sustainable productivity growth, innovation, and climate mitigation in the agricultural sector. The resulting perspective paper was presented at several European Commission events and contributed to discussions shaping future research priorities and the evolution of the Common Agricultural Policy.
Led by Yazhen Wu, the GLOBIOM-G4M team contributed updated land-use and forestry sector scenarios in support of the CMIP7 cycle. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is the internationally coordinated framework that brings together Earth System Models to run standardized climate experiments. Within this process, MESSAGE-GLOBIOM provided harmonized and updated socioeconomic (SSP) and emission reduction pathways as inputs for climate model simulations. As the successor to the previous SSP-RCP framework, CMIP7 will use these updated scenarios (MESSAGE-GLOBIOM was chosen as the marker model for the Low mitigation pathway) to assess future climate risks and mitigation strategies and will provide the basis for forthcoming IPCC forward-looking assessments.
As part of the 2025 IIASA Summer School for Systems Modelling held in Laxenburg on 17 July 2025, the GLOBIOM team delivered an interactive lecture introducing participants to the GLOBIOM modelling framework. The session engaged primarily Master’s and PhD-level students and provided an overview of the model’s structure, core features, and selected applications supporting policy analysis in the land-use, agriculture, and climate domains. The lecture combined conceptual explanations with practical examples and discussion, allowing participants to explore how models such as GLOBIOM contribute to evidence-based decision-making.
The Horizon Europe project NatuRISE has been successfully funded
The project is coordinated by Esther Boere, a long-term team member and now close collaborator at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. It will, among others, support further development of GLOBIOM to better assess the socio-economic and environmental impacts of nature restoration and contribute to evidence-based implementation of restoration policies across Europe.
GAMS training hosted at IIASA for GLOBIOM modelers
In 2025, the GLOBIOM team hosted a one-day on-site GAMS training delivered by experts from the GAMS company. The workshop focused on good modelling practices, improving model performance, handling infeasibilities, and making effective use of the broader GAMS ecosystem (including Studio and related tools). The session combined practical guidance with hands-on exercises and provided an opportunity for discussion on everyday modelling challenges.
Recognitions
Our research group leader and Program Director Petr Havlík was awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) by KU Leuven, one of Europe’s most renowned universities, in recognition of his exceptional contributions to global research in agricultural, food, climate, and environmental economics. He was also recognized as a 2025 Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate.
Looking ahead
Planning is underway for the 2026 edition of the BrightSpace, Lamasus and Tools4CAP Summer School at IIASA. The program will offer intensive training on land-use and sustainability modelling including hands-on GLOBIOM sessions. While deadline for applications for 2026 has passed, a follow-up summer school will be offered again next year in the context of Act4Cap project. Applications for the 2027 summer school are expected to open in fall 2026.
In June 2026, the GLOBIOM team will welcome three early-career researchers for a three-month research stay as part of YSSP. The program supports PhD students to advance research in an international, interdisciplinary setting with senior scientists at IIASA. Applications for the YSSP 2027 cohort will open in fall 2026.