02/10/2015 - The head of the Technical Support Unit of the IPCC’s Working Group on climate change mitigation, hosted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), has now been appointed as Professor for Science-Policy and Sustainable Development at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. The scientist, Jan Minx, also serves as head of the new working group “Applied Sustainability Science” at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), and he remains a guest scientist at PIK. Both the Working Group on mitigation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and MCC are led by PIK’s chief-economist Ottmar Edenhofer.
The IPCC’s Working Group on Mitigation published its Fifth Assessment Report last year, based on half a decade of work by 235 authors from 58 countries, and taking into account 38296 comments in the review process. “We are currently witnessing a veritable explosion of knowledge,” says Minx. “And, because of that, the synthesis of this knowledge is becoming a critically important field of research. Today’s policy decision-makers need knowledge maps to be able to make informed decisions in an increasingly complex world.”
