Frank Biermann | |
---|---|
Born | 1967 |
Nationality | German |
Occupation | University professor |
Known for | Global environmental and sustainability politics; pioneer of earth system governance paradigm |
Awards | Volvo Environment Prize (2024), ISA Distinguished Scholar Award in Environmental Studies (2021) |
Website | https://www.frankbiermann.org/ |
Frank Biermann (born 1967) is a German political scientist and professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His research interests are in "global institutions and organisations in the sustainability domain". [1] He was the founder in 2006 and first chair (for ten years) of the Earth System Governance Project. [2] [3] From 2018 until 2024 he directed a 2.5-million EUR research programme on the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. [4] [5] This was funded through a European Research Council Advanced Grant.
Biermann's statements on various topics have been mentioned in the media, for example in CNN, [6] BBC News, [7] and Time magazine. [8]
He has received several awards, most recently the Volvo Environment Prize in 2024 for "defining new pathways for international environmental governance in a period of global change", [9] and in 2021 the Distinguished Scholar Award in Environmental Studies by the International Studies Association. [2] Biermann is an elected Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. [10]
Biermann received a master’s degree in Political Science in 1993 from Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin), followed by a PhD in political science from the same university in 1997. His PhD thesis won the Joachim Tiburtius Prize, a prize that is awarded annually for the three best doctoral dissertations of the three Berlin universities. [11] In 1998, he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. [12]
He achieved the post-doctoral degree of habilitation in political science in 2001 also from Freie Universität Berlin. [12] He received a master's degree in International Law by the University of Aberdeen in 1994. [12]
In 2003, Biermann was appointed as professor of Political Science and of Environmental Policy Analysis at VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. From 2003 to 2015, Biermann was head of the Department of Environmental Policy Analysis at the same university. [1] During this time, from 2007-2014, he was director of the Netherlands Research School for Socio-Economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment, a national alliance of 11 institutes. [12] [14]
Since late 2015, Frank Biermann is a research professor of Global Sustainability Governance with the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. [1]
Biermann is also a member of the Science Advisory Council of the Stockholm Environment Institute [15] and an affiliate of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy’s Initiative on Environment and Sustainability at the National University of Singapore. [16] He also chairs the Board of Trustees of the Earth System Governance Foundation. [17]
Biermann’s research and publications have contributed to several areas of global sustainability policy and governance. This includes work on the effectiveness and reform of international organizations and bureaucracies, the role of multilateral treaty regimes, the protection of climate refugees, the impacts of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the politics of science, novel conceptualizations of planetary justice, climate policy and the restrictive governance of climate engineering, and fragmented architectures of global governance. [18]
Biermann pioneered the earth system governance paradigm in global change research in 2005 and was the founder and first chair (2008-2018) of the Earth System Governance Project, a global research network of sustainability scholars. From 2018 until 2024 he directed a 2.5-million EUR research programme on the steering effects of the SDGs. [4] [5]
Frank Biermann has regularly engaged in public debates about reforming global sustainability governance. For example, Biermann has called for the establishment of a World Environment Organization in 2000 [19] and the negotiation of an International Agreement on Protecting Climate Refugees in 2010. [20] He has spoken in the United Nations General Assembly in 2014 during an Interactive Dialogue on Harmony with Nature. [21] [22] This fed into the Harmony with Nature report of the Secretary-General of the UN. [23]
Ever since the start of the Sustainable Development Goals process in 2015, Biermann has spoken in various fora about reforming these global goals, based on relevant research projects which he has been leading. An example of such a forum is the Global Citizen and Youth Empowerment System Conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York in 2024. [24] He has also published with colleagues a number of global assessments and policy proposals on the SDGs, for example in the academic journals Nature Sustainability [25] and Science. [26]
Regarding climate engineering, Biermann states that "I increasingly fear that the slow pace of global climate policies will lead to dangerous calls for reckless climate engineering or geoengineering". [27] For this reason, he together with colleagues, has developed an initiative for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering which was launched in January 2022 with an open letter. [28] This letter in support of such a non-use agreement has been signed by over 500 scientists from dozens of countries, and endorsed by about 2000 civil society organisations (as of 2024). [29] The goal of the letter was to make it clear "that the academic community didn’t want governments to develop solar geoengineering technologies" according to reporting in Time magazine which quoted Frank Biermann. [8] He also said about this letter: "it’s a sign that anti-geoengineering scientists are getting more organized". [8] On the same topic, in a CNN article in 2023, Frank Biermann is quoted as follows about solar geoengineering: “It’s very risky. It cannot be governed. It’s unethical,” and “And it is one of the biggest dangers in the current climate policies.” [6] A BBC News article in the same year quoted him as saying "If the majority of countries object to the deployment… the political cost for any country to do it unilaterally is extremely high." [7]
Biermann is the founding editor of the Elsevier journal Earth System Governance, an open access journal launched in 2009. [30] This journal is highly ranked in the fields of international relations (fifth rank out of 159 journals), political science (tenth out of 315), and environmental policy (fifth out of 176). [31] Data from the journal's publisher Elsevier shows that the journal has a CiteScore of 9.0 and an Impact Factor of 4.4 (as of 2024). [32] In the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator this journal appears as a Q1 journal (first quartile) in various disciplines. [33]
He also edits three ongoing book series:
Biermann has authored, edited or co-edited 19 books and published over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and academic books. [41] [18] His h-index as calculated in Google Scholar is 80. [18] The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications. [42] [43]
Selected books where Biermann was sole author or co-editor include:
Sustainable development is an approach to growth and human development that aims to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The aim is to have a society where living conditions and resources meet human needs without undermining planetary integrity. Sustainable development aims to balance the needs of the economy, environment, and society. The Brundtland Report in 1987 helped to make the concept of sustainable development better known.
Climate engineering is the intentional large-scale alteration of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change. The term has been used as an umbrella term for both carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation modification when applied at a planetary scale. However, these two processes have very different characteristics, and are now often discussed separately. Carbon dioxide removal techniques remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and are part of climate change mitigation. Solar radiation modification is the reflection of some sunlight back to space to cool the earth. Some publications include passive radiative cooling as a climate engineering technology. The media tends to also use climate engineering for other technologies such as glacier stabilization, ocean liming, and iron fertilization of oceans. The latter would modify carbon sequestration processes that take place in oceans.
Global governance refers to institutions that coordinate the behavior of transnational actors, facilitate cooperation, resolve disputes, and alleviate collective action problems. Global governance broadly entails making, monitoring, and enforcing rules. Within global governance, a variety of types of actors – not just states – exercise power.
This is a list of climate change topics.
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Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) is Canada's largest publisher of international scientific journals. It started in 1929 as the NRC Research Press, part of the National Research Council (NRC). In 2010, the organization spun off from NRC and was incorporated as a not-for-profit.
Solar radiation modification (SRM), is a group of large-scale approaches to limit global warming by increasing the amount of sunlight that is reflected away from Earth and back to space. Among the potential approaches, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is the most-studied, followed by marine cloud brightening (MCB); others such as ground- and space-based show less potential or feasibility and receive less attention. SRM could be a supplement to climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, but would not be a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. SRM is a form of climate engineering or geoengineering.
The Earth System Governance Project is a research network that builds on the work from about a dozen research centers and hundreds of researchers studying earth system governance. It is a long-term, interdisciplinary social science research alliance. Its origins are an international program called the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. The ESG Project started in January 2009. Over time, it has evolved into a broader research alliance that builds on an international network of research centers, lead faculty and research fellows. It is now the largest social science research network in the area of governance and global environmental change.
John S. Dryzek is a Centenary Professor at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra's Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis.
Planetary boundaries are a framework to describe limits to the impacts of human activities on the Earth system. Beyond these limits, the environment may not be able to self-regulate anymore. This would mean the Earth system would leave the period of stability of the Holocene, in which human society developed. The framework is based on scientific evidence that human actions, especially those of industrialized societies since the Industrial Revolution, have become the main driver of global environmental change. According to the framework, "transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental-scale to planetary-scale systems."
The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) was a research programme that studied the human and societal aspects of the phenomenon of global change.
Earth system governance is a broad area of scholarly inquiry that builds on earlier notions of environmental policy and nature conservation, but puts these into the broader context of human-induced transformations of the entire earth system. The integrative paradigm of earth system governance (ESG) has evolved into an active research area that brings together a variety of disciplines including political science, sociology, economics, ecology, policy studies, geography, sustainability science, and law.
Diana Liverman is a retired Regents Professor of Geography and Development and past Director of the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences in Tucson, Arizona.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations (UN) members in 2015, created 17 world Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The aim of these global goals is "peace and prosperity for people and the planet" – while tackling climate change and working to preserve oceans and forests. The SDGs highlight the connections between the environmental, social and economic aspects of sustainable development. Sustainability is at the center of the SDGs, as the term sustainable development implies.
Policy coherence for development (PCD) is an approach and policy tool for integrating the economic, social, environmental and governance dimensions of sustainable development at all stages of domestic and international policy making. It is the aim of PCD to make foreign relations to be as ecologically, economically and socially coherent as possible and thereby to make international co-operation for international development more effective.
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Michele Betsill is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science at Colorado State University, where she has also been the chair of the department. She studies climate change and sustainability policies, with a particular focus on how non-governmental actors and sub-national governments respond to climate change. She was a co-founder of the Earth System Governance Project in 2009.
Xuemei Bai (白雪梅) is a Distinguished Professor of Urban Environment and Human Ecology at the Australian National University. She was the winner of the 2018 Volvo Environmental Prize, and is the winner of the KIEL Global Economy Prize 2021. She is an elected fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and an ARC Laureate Fellow (2023-). Bai is a commissioner of the Earth Commission, leading a group on methods of cross-scale translation from planetary limits to local actors. She has been named as one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People in Climate Change Policy in 2019 and 2021.
Joyeeta Gupta is a social scientist focusing on environment and development. She is Distinguished Professor of Climate Justice, Sustainability and Global Justice, and is also Professor of Environment and Development in the Global South and holds a water professorship at IHE-Delft Institute for Water Education. She is the co-chair (2024-2025) of the UN Secretary General Appointed Group of Ten High-level Representatives of Civil Society, Private Sector and Scientific Community to Promote Science, Technology and Innovation for the SDGs (10-Member-Group) - a component of the UN Technology Facilitation Mechanism. She is a Commissioner in the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, organized by OECD, financed by the Netherlands Government (2022-24). She was Co-chair of the first phase of the Earth Commission (2019-2024), convened by Future Earth and the Global Commons Alliance during which time 22 publications were achieved with a top publication in Nature and in Lancet Planetary Health. Along with Johan Rockström, she did a plenary presentation of the Earth Commission results at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2023. She also was co-chair of UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook-6 assessing knowledge on the environment and the Sustainable Development Goals. The report and its Summary for Policy Makers were presented to the 4th United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) for endorsement by UN Member States at that assembly. The report received the Prose Prize. She was awarded the 2023 Spinoza Prize - the highest distinction in Dutch science and also called the 'Dutch Nobel Prize', the 2022 Piers Sellers prize for world leading contribution to solution-focused climate research, Priestley International Centre for Climate, the 2019 Prose Award for the GEO, the 2015 Atmospheric Science Librarians International Choice Award for her Cambridge University Press Book: History of Global Climate Governance, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize as an IPCC author, and the 2005 2nd Zayed prize as a Millenium Ecosystem Assessment author. In 2024 she did a concert on Climate Injustice in Four Seasons at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Eindhoven. Her work has been made into a three dimensional art piece in the pop climate museum which the public can interact with. She is also featured in the ‘Prize Cupboard’ in the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in Leiden.
Aliyu Salisu Barau is a Nigerian academic and a full professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Bayero University Kano. He is the Dean of the Faculty of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Bayero University Kano and the West Africa Hub Director of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN), affiliated with the Earth Institute, Columbia University. He is also a Chartered Town Planner of the UK's Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI).