[2] Past directors have included Howard Raiffa, a professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School, Roger Levien, former vice president for Strategy at Xerox, Leen Hordijk, former Director at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Joint Research Centre, European Commission, Ispra, Italy, and Detlof von Winterfeldt, professor at the University of Southern California.

IIASA was established by a charter signed on 4 October 1972 by representatives of the Soviet Union, the United States, and ten other countries from the Eastern and Western blocks at The Royal Society in London.

For IIASA, it was the beginning of a project to use scientific cooperation to build bridges across the Cold War divide and to confront growing global problems on a truly international scale.

[10] IIASA's approach of bringing together different nationalities and disciplines to work toward common goals has now been widely imitated, for example, in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme.

Today, IIASA brings together a wide range of scientific skills to provide science-based insights into critical policy issues in international and national debates on global change.

[11] The IIASA mission is to provide scientific guidance to policymakers by finding solutions to global problems through applied systems analysis in order to improve human well-being and protect the environment.

The Vienna Statement on Science Diplomacy, a document created by IIASA, advocating for a renewed global commitment to international scientific cooperation to help countries build stronger relations for the benefit of all of humanity, has been endorsed by close to two hundred eminent personalities from the academic and policymaking community, including H.E.

Together with the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), IIASA initiated the Food Agriculture Land Use Biodiversity and Energy (FABLE) Consortium as a knowledge platform.

The IIASA Challenges and Opportunities for Economic Integration within a wider European and Eurasian Space project served as a platform where key stakeholders could engage in evidence-based dialogue.

The report was a result of the collaborative and integrated work of over 500 authors, analysts and reviewers worldwide who contributed independent, scientifically based and policy-relevant analysis of current and emerging energy issues and options.