Former MCC researcher awarded with renowned Köppen Prize

The Wladimir Peter Köppen Prize for 2016 is awarded to Linus Mattauch, who was a researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) from 2012 to 2016 and finished his doctoral thesis last year. Mattauch was awarded for his outstanding dissertation, which he submitted to the Technische Universität Berlin, by the Cluster of Excellence „Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction“ (CliSAP) – a research association of the Universität Hamburg, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, and the German Climate Computing Center.

It is the first time the jury has selected a purely economic work, which the members praised as an excellent bridge-builder between insights gleaned from the natural sciences on the one hand and political action on the other. This is the eighth time the Köppen Prize has been awarded, recognizing outstanding dissertations produced by young academics aged 30 or under.

Mattauch’s dissertation addresses the economic impacts of climate change mitigation policies. When individual countries introduce concrete measures to achieve globally set climate objectives, conflicts often arise with regard to fairly distributing the resultant burdens. Yet Mattauch, by adapting conventional economic theories, demonstrates that effective climate policy and economic growth do not have to be mutually exclusive. He investigates, for example, how climate-friendly investments affect the distribution of wealth. Further, he makes concrete suggestions on how the targeted use of taxation can be used to make climate policies more efficient and fair.

In the eyes of the jury, Mattauch succeeds in skillfully expanding established models, bridging the gaps between the methods and theories of various disciplines and schools of thought. They went on to commend his impressive ability to integrate his findings into broader social and academic discourses.