Networking

IIASA's World Population Program will serve as the global headquarters of an extensive network of researchers and institutes working in the field of population and sustainable development.

This extensive network already exists and has been serviced for many years by POP's newsletter POPNET (distributed to almost 3,000 scholars around the globe) and by three "regional population meta-centers":

• the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis (with headquarters in Singapore, funded by the Wellcome Trust and established in collaboration with IIASA);
• the European Demographic Research Ensemble (EDRE), a consortium of major European demographic institutes coordinated by the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences;
• and the African Population and Health Research Centre in Nairobi (APHRC), a pan-African institute to which POP has established a close working relationship.

These regional meta-centers effectively manage most of the networking activities so that the emphasis at IIASA can be primarily on the development of new methods and innovative research that is of relevance to global change.

But these regional meta-centers not only help to spread IIASA's methods for specific local applications, they are also essential for feeding substantive knowledge into the assumptions of the IIASA population forecasts. Hence this system of regional networks brings mutual benefits, with IIASA's role being clearly on the side of innovative methodological developments and of global level analysis.

Responsible for this page: Isolde Prommer
Last updated: 30 Jan 2007