The Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy (official German name: ) is a German research institution for sustainability research, focusing on impacts and practical application. It explores and develops models, strategies, and instruments to support sustainable development at local, national, and international levels. Research at the Wuppertal Institute focuses on ecology and its relation to economy and society. Special emphasis is put on analyzing and supporting technological and social innovations that decouple the prosperity of economic growth from the use of natural resources. The organization's activities focus on developing transformation processes aimed at shaping a climate-friendly and resource-efficient world.
The institute was founded by politician Johannes Rau (SPD) and scientist Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker (SPD) in 1990 and 1991 and is mainly financed by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Organization and networks The Wuppertal Institute collaborates with universities and institutes in Germany and abroad. It has formal cooperation agreements with the Lund University, the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering of the Tsinghua University Beijing, the University of Osnabrück, the HafenCity University Hamburg, the Center for Environment and Energy Research and Studies (CEERS) in Teheran and the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. A cooperation agreement was also reached with the University of Kassel. Joint research projects with the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) in Japan and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in India are regularly conducted. The institute is also a member of the Johannes Rau Research Association and the Ecological Research Network (Ecornet).
The Wuppertal Institute describes itself as an intermediary between science, economy and politics, meaning that its sustainability research design is application-oriented. It has the legal status of a non-profit limited company (gemeinnützige Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, according to German law). It receives basic funding from the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the sole owner of the Wuppertal Institute. The major part of its funding derives from third-party research projects. The Wuppertal Institute's clients cover governmental organizations ranging from local authorities to ministries at both state and national levels, business and industry ranging from medium-sized companies to corporate groups and industrial associations, civil society ranging from environmental associations to churches, and trade unions and foundations.
The Wuppertal Institute is based in Wuppertal and employs approximately 250 workers. Two-thirds are research staff and come from a wide variety of background disciplines: natural and environmental sciences, geography, systems sciences, engineering, planning, law, economics, and political and social science. The staff consists of roughly as many men as women. The Berlin office promotes cooperation with scientific institutes and research partners in the capital.
An International Advisory Board stands for the independence and the Institute's scientific quality and provides advice concerning strategic basic research issues.
Financing of the Wuppertal Institute The institute is financed by third-party funds (Drittmittel) and core funding from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Wuppertal Institute is a non-profit GmbH whose sole owner is the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The chairman of the supervisory board is a state secretary of the respective government.
History The Wuppertal Institute started its research work in 1991, headed by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker. The later Federal President Johannes Rau (SPD) gave significant support to the founding when he was still Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia. He ensured that the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy was established in his hometown. The Institute's mission – formulated in its partnership agreement – was, first of all, to "promote measures and initiatives to secure the climate situation, to improve the environment and to save energy, as an interface between the scientific pursuit of knowledge and its practical application”. Founding President Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker advocated a resource strategy founded on reducing resource use by means of what he called an "efficiency revolution" pointing the way towards new models of prosperity. Efficiency is the cornerstone of the book Factor Four - Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Amory and Hunter Lovins (Rocky Mountain Institute, US). They assembled fifty examples of successful products using half the usual amount of natural resources, including hypercars, "Passivhaus", superwindows, long-lasting furniture, and a summer holiday in the Austrian Alps. The book was accepted as a report to the Club of Rome, and was on the best-seller lists for several months. It has been translated into more than ten languages.
Peter Hennicke studied and worked on using efficiency potentials in the field of energy use before he came to the Wuppertal Institute. He intensified research in this area as head of the Energy Division; later on, he succeeded Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker as president from 2000 to 2008. Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek, the vice-president at that time, found a large audience proposing his MIPS concept for gauging material input per service unit and identifying "ecological rucksacks" that "carry" products and services when they arrive at the consumer. He was aware of the fact that the then prevailing environmental policy was not paying enough attention to the great material flows; he advocated that besides already existing successful legal measures for pollutant emissions limitation, it would be necessary to reduce the material flows to conserve the finite material, energy, and natural resources. With his concept of the “Ecological rucksack” he introduced his ideas into scientific and political debates.
In 2001, the Tokyo-based Takeda Foundation awarded Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker and Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek a price worth one hundred million Japanese yen for their concepts "Factor Four", "MIPS" and "ecological rucksack", an expression of the Wuppertal Institute's international recognition.
Following the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the implementation of Agenda 21 was high on the (environmental) policy agenda in many countries. The first attempts were very timid and showed a lack of experience in implementing the new leading principle called sustainable development. The 1995 report Zukunftsfähiges Deutschland (published as “Greening the North”), commissioned by BUND and Misereor, was to remedy this: The Wuppertal Institute team, headed by Reinhard Loske and Raimund Bleischwitz, pioneered a new methodology. Beginning with an estimate of the Earth's carrying capacity, the "environmental space", the study developed leading principles to help Germans avoid overusing the environmental space to which they are "entitled". The principles are based on concepts such as efficiency and sufficiency.
Prof. Dr. Wolfang Sachs, a scientist of the Wuppertal Institute, member of the Club of Rome, and lead author at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), directed the study “Sustainable Germany in a Globalized World”. It was published as a book in October 2008 by Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND), Church Development Service (Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst - EED) and "Friends of the Earth" to stimulate the social discussion on globally sustainable development.
Agreed in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol took the global nature of the climate change into account, even if it was ratified only many years later. The Kyoto Protocol was the first international agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The Wuppertal Institute's Climate Policy Division was closely involved in setting this milestone in the international climate debate.
In 2002, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia decided to no longer support the institute. The Wuppertal Institute examined the matter on the recommendation of the respected Science Council, which advises the federal and state governments on research policy matters.
The institute's environmental policy tasks are still important and worthy of support, but the concrete work suffers from serious conceptual deficiencies, said the council. Qualified research is particularly lacking in the fields of transport and climate development.
In August 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Wuppertal Institute jointly founded the Center on Sustainable Consumption and Production (CSCP). As a member of the globally cooperating UNEP Centers, its mission is to develop practically oriented contributions to the ten-year Sustainable Consumption and Production program that was agreed upon at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002.
In September 2004, the Wuppertal Institute's Berlin office was established under the direction of Hermann E. Ott. Wolfgang Sachs took over the management in 2009, Maja Göpel in 2013, and Daniel Vallentin and Timon Wehnert in 2017. Since 2019 Timon Wehnert and Stefan Werland are heading the Berlin office.
Since its foundation, the Wuppertal Institute has been working on visions for a sustainable, low-CO2 society. Based on the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Germany by 80 percent by 2050, the Wuppertal Institute has developed various long-term scenarios for the German energy system. They serve as a basis for the long-term energy study of the German government and also the climate protection policies of municipalities' strategies towards the long-term goal of a low-carbon society. A study commissioned by Siemens AG for the city of Munich shows what this could look like. Long-term energy scenarios, such as those developed by the Wuppertal Institute together with research partners for the German Federal Ministry of the Environment, contributed to the German government's decision after the Fukushima reactor accident to abandon nuclear power generation and initiate the energy turnaround.
Uwe Schneidewind became the third president of the institute on March 1, 2010. He took over as successor to Peter Hennicke after he had retired for more than two years. Schneidewind holds a professorship at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. At the Wuppertal Institute, Schneidewind placed the transdisciplinary understanding of science within the conceptual framework of transition research. In 2011 the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) published its main report "World in Transition – A Social Contract for Sustainability", which calls for a fundamental change: a shift from a fossil to a post-fossil society. The task of research, it states, is to examine these transition processes and to support the transformation through specific innovations in the relevant sectors. This approach characterizes the scientific work at the institute. It also includes the question of securing prosperity, the "good life", beyond unrestrained economic growth. In the sustainability discourse, it is becoming increasingly clear that more efficient use of resources is eminently important, but it is not enough because rebound effects often reduce efficiency gains. The Wuppertal Institute is conducting ever more concrete research into how sufficiency strategies can be effective and how they can be used politically, in fields such as construction, energy or local politics.