Academics with an exceptional worldwide credibility in the field of sustainable advancement and who can demonstrate comprehensive experience in moving clinical findings from research study to society are invited to use. Here, the focus should rest on aspects of the social sciences or liberal arts that include subject areas such as sociology, economics or cultural studies. TU Dortmund University will host the professorship, which will overarch all departments and profit from a broad network of thematically related professorships in the Ruhr region.
By naming the professorship after Klaus Töpfer, who as a leading political leader from North Rhine-Westphalia rendered outstanding services at both nationwide and international level to ecological and environment security in addition to social and economic justice, the UA Ruhr partners are acknowledging his devotion. As Federal Minister for the Environment from 1987 to 1994 during the time of the Bundestag in Bonn, he was accountable, for example, for presenting the ban on CFCs, the Green Dot and Post 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 Founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Research Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, which is now part of the Helmholtz Association. Among his lots of functions in an honorary capability, he was likewise 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 runs as a think tank. Töpfer’s home remained the Westphalian town of Höxter, where he had invested his academic year after leaving Silesia in the aftermath of World War II. In 2019, the State of North Rhine-Westphalia granted him the State Reward for his “years of exceptional commitment to the conservation of Production”. Klaus Töpfer died, aged 85, on 8 June 2024.