Academics with an impressive worldwide reputation in the field of sustainable advancement and who can demonstrate extensive experience in transferring scientific findings from research to society are invited to use. Here, the focus needs to lie on aspects of the social sciences or humanities that consist of disciplines such as sociology, economics or cultural research studies. TU Dortmund University will host the professorship, which will overarch all departments and profit from a broad network of thematically associated professorships in the Ruhr area.
By calling the professorship after Klaus Töpfer, who as a leading politician from North Rhine-Westphalia rendered outstanding services at both national and international level to environmental and climate security as well as social and financial justice, the UA Ruhr partners are acknowledging his commitment. As Federal Minister for the Environment from 1987 to 1994 during the time of the Bundestag in Bonn, he was accountable, for instance, for introducing the restriction on CFCs, the Green Dot and Article 20a of the Basic Law on the protection of the natural structures of life and animals. From 1998 to 2006, he was Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya. From 2009 to 2015, Klaus Töpfer, who held a PhD in economics, was the Establishing Director of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Research Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, which is now part of the Helmholtz Association. Amongst his lots of roles in an honorary capability, he was also a member of the board of directors of Welthungerhilfe from 2008 to 2012, one of the largest private help companies in Germany, and for around four years (2013-2018) he chaired the “Agora Council for Germany” of the Agora Energiewende, which operates as a think tank. Töpfer’s home stayed the Westphalian town of Höxter, where he had actually invested his academic year after leaving Silesia in the consequences of World War II. In 2019, the State of North Rhine-Westphalia granted him the State Reward for his “decades of exceptional commitment to the preservation of Production”. Klaus Töpfer died, aged 85, on 8 June 2024.