Professor Sprinz is a leading expert on climate governance. He is a Senior Scientist with PIK—Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, a Professor with the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and a Research Affiliate at ESSCA School of Management, Angers, France. He is also a Lead Author in the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on international cooperation. During 2009-2012, Detlef Sprinz served as Chairman of the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was a member of the International Advisory Committee of MILEN—Environmental Change and Sustainable Energy, University of Oslo, Norway (2010-2013), and was a Senior Research Fellow with CICERO—Center for International Climate and Environmental Research—Oslo, Norway (2011-2013). Detlef Sprinz is a member of the European Academy, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany; co-founded Ecologic Institute; and provides consultancy services to companies, governments, international institutions, research institutes, and think tanks. He also serves on a range of advisory boards of national, European, and international projects, journals, and institutions. He taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; University of Oslo, University of Potsdam, Yale University, and the University of Zurich.
As a BECC guest researcher, Professor Sprinz will advance his work and collaboration on the project “LiMa – A Liquid Market for Forest Carbon”. The project’s goal is to enable forest carbon to be a major component of a transition to a greenhouse gas future where net emissions will approach zero. To this end, building and maintaining forest carbon sinks at scale has to be practically implementable, i.e., forest carbon has to be prioritized, a price has to be established to compensate for alternative uses of forests, and a business model has to exist to provide long-term incentives. During his time in Lund, Professor Sprinz plans to particularly develop the modules of the LiMa project that are at the core of interdisciplinary social science research, with an emphasis on (1) remuneration standards; and (2) compliance markets.
He looks forward to engage with a variety of BECC researchers from different backgrounds on these and other topics. This includes an envisaged BECC workshop on forest carbon sinks as well as various presentations of his work to the BECC community and beyond.
