Prof. Dr. Ernst-Ulrich von Weizsäcker
Prof. Dr. Ernst-Ulrich von Weizsäcker
Former President Club of Rome; Founder and former Director Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, Member of Parliament
Born 1939 in Zurich, Switzerland. Highschool in Göttingen, Germany. Master of Physics, Hamburg University, PhD in Biology Freiburg University. 1972 Full Professor of Interdisciplinary Biology at Essen University. 1975-1980 Founding President of Kassel University, Germany. 1981-1984 Director at the United Nations Centre for Science and Technology for Development, New York. 1984-1990, Director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy, Bonn, Paris and London. 1991 Founding President of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, which developed into a leading think tank on climate policy, energy efficiency, and material flows. 1998 – 2005 Member of the German Bundestag, chairing consecutively the Select Committee on Globalization, and the Environment Committee. 2006-2008 Dean of the Graduate School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2007, he was appointed Co-Chair (with Ashok Khosla) of UNEP’s International Resource Panel, a function he held until end 2014. Returning to Germany from Santa Barbara in 2009, he was invited by Freiburg University to serve as Honorary Professor, teaching climate and resource policies. In 2013, he became listed among the 100 most influential thinkers of the world. He is married to Christine von Weizsäcker, President of Ecoropa, and they have five children.
Honours include three honorary doctorates (outside Germany), the (WWF) Duke of Edinburgh Gold Medal, the Italian Premio de Natura (shared with PM Gro Brundtland), the Japanese Takeda Award, the German Environment Prize, and the Grand Cross of Merit of Germany. He is a member of the European Academy of Arts and Science, and of the World Academy of Art and Science.
Publications include several books in German and English. Weizsäcker was lead author of four Reports to the Club of Rome: Factor Four (1995 with Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins), Limits to Privatization (2005 with Oran Young and Matthias Finger), Factor Five (2009 with Charlie Hargroves et al), and Come On! (2018, with Anders Wijkman, prepared for the 50th Anniversary of the Club of Rome). All were translated into five to twenty languages, including Chinese and Japanese.
