Raimund Bleischwitz

Raimund Bleischwitz
Raimund Bleischwitz, 2016
Born	(1961-08-07) August 7, 1961 Mönchengladbach, Germany
Occupation	Professor and Deputy Director of Institute for Sustainable Resources at University College London
Website	https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=RBLEI92

Raimund Bleischwitz (born 7 August 1961) is a German academic and environmental and resource economics scholar. He is a Professor at University College London where he holds the position of BHP Billiton Chair in Sustainable Global Resources. He is a recognized expert and influential policy adviser in topics of resource efficiency, circular economy, resource nexus, raw material conflicts, eco-innovation, incentive systems and policies, industry and sustainability.^[1]

Early life

Bleischwitz was born in Mönchengladbach, Germany. After finishing his secondary school studies at Stiftisches Humanistisches Gymnasium in Mönchengladbach (1980), he pursued his university studies at University of Bonn. He wrote his PhD on resource productivity at University of Wuppertal (1998) and his "Habilitation" on collective goods and knowledge-creating institutions at University of Kassel (2005).^[2] He is married and has two children.

Career

His career began in the late 1980s in the German Bundestag as a political adviser to the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He later worked as a researcher at the Institute for European Environmental Policy in Bonn and London. In the early 1990s he was supporting Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker in establishing the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, where he headed the research management and later the "Factor 4" research desk. In 1996, together with Reinhard Loske, he coordinated the study "Sustainable Germany". In the late 1990s and early 2000s he was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany and held various lecturer positions at Cologne Business School and at University of Bonn. He also participated in the Japanese study program Millennium Collaborations Projects on climate, energy and eco-efficiency conducted by the Japanese Economic and Social Research Institute and was a fellow at the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science.^[3]

In the period 2003-2013 he acted as Co-Director of the Research Group on Material Flows and Resource Management at the Wuppertal Institute in Bonn, Germany, and since 2003 as a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium where he held the Toyota Chair for Industry and Sustainability. He held fellowships at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University and at the Transatlantic Academy, both in Washington DC. Since August 2013 he acts as Deputy Director of the Institute for Sustainable Resources at University College London.

Author

One of his influential works has been Zukunftsfähiges Deutschland: Ein Beitrag zu einer Global Nachhaltigen Entwicklung, which stimulated a broad public debate on sustainable development in Germany.^[4] He has written more than 200 publications, including the books Want, Waste or War? The Global Resource Nexus and the Struggle for Land, Energy, Food, Water and Minerals, International Economics of Resource Efficiency: Eco-innovation Policies for a Green Economy, Sustainable Resource Management: Global Trends, Visions and Policies, Eco-Efficiency, Regulation and Sustainable Business: Towards a Governance Structure for Sustainable Development, and Corporate Governance of Sustainability: A Co-Evolutionary View on Resource Management.

References