Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker
Honorary President of the Club of Rome, Doctor of Philosophy
Professor Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker is the Honorary President of the Club of Rome. Early in his career, he served as a professor and director of several universities and institutes, such as the United Nations Centre for Science and Technology for Development. In 1972, he was appointed Professor of Interdisciplinary Biology at the University of Essen, and in 1975, President of the University of Kassel.
In 1981, he moved to New York to serve as Director of the UN Centre for Science and Technology for Development. He returned to Europe in 1984 to direct the Institute for European Environmental Policy in Bonn, London, and Paris. In 1991, he was appointed Founding President of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, which soon became the largest think tank for climate policy in Europe.
In 1998, he was elected as a member of the German Bundestag, where he served as Chairman of the Globalization Commission and later the Environment Committee. Deciding not to seek re-election, he accepted an appointment in 2006 as Dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a position he held until his retirement in late 2008. In 2007, he was appointed Co-Chair (along with Ashok Khosla) of the UNEP International Resource Panel. In 2008, he was a recipient of the Takeda Award for outstanding achievement in the application of new engineering developments.
In 2014, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential thinkers. The Top 100 list also included Nobel laureates Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Murray Gell-Mann, and Daniel Kahneman; entrepreneurs George Soros, Craig Venter, Tim O’Reilly, and Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web); authors Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Thomas Friedman; biologists Jane Goodall, Edward O. Wilson, Jared Diamond, and Richard Dawkins; and philosophers Jürgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, and Peter Sloterdijk. Al Gore continues to top the ranking.
Recognized as one of the world’s most authoritative thinkers on resource efficiency, Professor Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker is the lead author of three Reports to the Club of Rome: Factor Four (1995), Limits to Privatization (2005), and Factor Five (2009), as well as a co-author of the book Come On! (2017).