Nobel Sustainability Trust and TUM have honored this year's winners of the Sustainability Award, which is supported by the Nobel Sustainability Trust:
Mathis Wackernagel (Global Footprint Network)
Klaus Butterbach-Bahl (Aarhus University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Jiuhui Qu (Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University)
For the second year, the TUM-IAS has overseen the two-step selection process helped by international experts from academia and industry and TUM professors and researchers.
The awardees will be presented at the 4th Summit of the Nobel Sustainability Trust from November 20 to 21, 2024, in San Francisco.
About the Awardees:
Category: Leadership in Implementation
Swiss and American sustainability advocate Dr. Mathis Wackernagel co-developed the concept of Ecological Footprint in the early 1990s with his doctorate supervisor, Professor William Rees, at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. This widespread and popular concept helps compare human demand against planetary or regional ecosystem regeneration. Based on this idea, he co-founded in 2003 with Susan Burns the Global Footprint Network, an international nonprofit organization founded in 2003, advising politics and organizations in their decisions to strive for a more sustainable world and raising awareness about the limited natural resources of our planet. Its largest campaign initiated in 2006 is the annual Earth Overshoot Day which marks the date when humanity has used up all the natural resources that the Earth can provide in a year.
Wackernagel's work with governments, corporations, and organizations has influenced environmental policies and sustainability practices worldwide. Wackernagel has authored and contributed to more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, numerous articles, reports, and various books on sustainability that focus on embracing resource limits and developing metrics for sustainability.
Category: Outstanding Research and Development in Agriculture
Professor Klaus Butterbach-Bahl, is a German biogeochemist, head of the Danish Pioneer Center for Landscape Research in Sustainable Agricultural Futures (Land-CRAFT) at the Department of Agroecology of the Aarhus University, Denmark, and principal scientist at the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Atmospheric Environmental Research (IMK-IFU), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Klaus Butterbach-Bahl is known for his research on nitrogen cycles and greenhouse gas emissions at regional and global levels, particularly in relation to their agricultural and ecological impact. He has been investigating the drivers of these emissions, modeling, and exploring practical mitigation options under climate change constraints. His research interests have taken him to study rice paddies in Southeast Asia and China, grasslands in Inner Mongolia and Tibet, livestock in East- and West Africa, and potatoes in Denmark.
Through numerous partnerships with researchers and organizations around the world, Klaus Butterbach-Bahl has been sharing knowledge and training early-career scientists to address issues related to climate change, ecosystem sustainability, and environmental protection. As an example, he successfully contributed to establishing the Mazingira Center, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Kenya, the first state-of-the-art laboratory in sub-Saharan Africa to assess the environmental footprint of livestock systems through measurements.
Category: Outstanding Research and Development in Water
Dr. Juihui Qu, professor, and former Director of the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Distinguished Professor at Tsinghua University, is an international leader in the field of water treatment technology.
He has developed a comprehensive “from source to tap” technical system that ensures safe drinking water across urban and rural areas, while also addressing water risk recognition and management. This comprises major breakthroughs in the development of low-cost technologies for the removal of arsenic and fluoride in groundwater. His innovative purification techniques could positively impact over 200 million individuals in China and globally.
He led China’s Water Science and Technology Innovation Plans for more than 20 years and significantly contributed to China's ecological and environmental restoration such as the Yangtze River basin or the wetland region Baiyangdian. He also accompanied large infrastructure projects with industry partners and led the development of China’s first wastewater resource factory in Yixing, Jiangsu Province.
As an Advisor to the UN Environment Program (UNEP), he has been instrumental in establishing a dynamic collaborative framework for sharing and adapting water treatment technologies between China and other developing nations such as Sri Lanka and Nepal.
Further link: TUM Press release