Homepage of Dr. Hermann Held

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Dr. Hermann Held is Co-Chair of PIK's Research Domain “Sustainable Solutions” (co-chairing with Prof. Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer). His research is on investment paths that should robustly combine climate protection and economic growth under climate and technology uncertainty to the greatest possible extent. Recent work seeks to anchor insurance concepts in the adaptation and mitigation area.

He did his PhD in Physics on “Quantum Chaos in Rydberg Atoms” at the University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, followed by an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the University of California in Berkeley. During his post-doc period, he also conducted activities on methodologies for risk assessment in industrial processes, together with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the ETH Zurich. Since 1999 he has worked at PIK where he has been able to combine his interests in system science and environmental management. He lectures on “Climate Physics”, “Economics of Climate Protection” and “Bayesian Learning” at the University of Potsdam and the Technical University of Berlin. He is co-editor of the journal “Earth System Dynamics”. For the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change), he is acting as a lead author of the chapter “Integrated Risk and Uncertainty Assessment of Climate Change Policy Options”.

From 2004-2009, he re-founded the division “Energy, Resources and Environment” and acted as its President in the council of the European Geosciences Union. He acted as a referee for Working Group I (Scientific basics of climate protection) of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Within the framework of the newly-founded European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), he took over the leadership for Germany in 2009 in the proposal for a virtual 5-nations-climate department (“KIC”). Since its approval, he has been developing a Europe-wide EIT-KIC scenario process that should explore and socially embed the feasibility of new climate markets.