Knowledge is power
Sociologist Professor Anna-Katharina Hornidge is the Director of the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), an institute of the Johannes Rau Research Foundation, as well as Professor for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Bonn. Researching how knowledge is generated, transferred and disseminated, she studies the role played by various forms of knowledge in mastering environmental, political, social and economic processes of change. In regional terms, she focuses on the societies of Southeast and Central Asia as well as East and West Africa. In her capacity as Director of IDOS, Hornidge advises policymakers based on her own research and that of her institute. She is an active member of several German, European and UN bodies, including serving as co-chair of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen, WBGU) and chair of the Expert Committee on Science of the German Commission for UNESCO. A member of the Individuals and Societies Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) at the University of Bonn, Hornidge has been elected to the academy’s Class of Humanities.
Investments generate greenhouse gases too
Everyone in Germany causes an average of some 10 metric tons of CO₂ to be released into the atmosphere every year. Anyone wondering about the size of their personal carbon footprint can go online and find out in just a few clicks. The calculator uses a set of conventional consumption questions to work out the associated greenhouse gas emissions and produce a total that reflects the person’s own contribution to climate change. Professor Hendrik Hakenes works at the Institute of Finance and Statistics at the University of Bonn and is a member of its ECONtribute Cluster of Excellence and TRA Individuals and Societies. He has devised a model for calculating carbon emissions that also considers an individual’s financial decisions and can be supplemented by additional factors such as their choice of employer. Besides green finance, his research also focuses on corporate finance and finance theory. He has been admitted to the academy’s Class of Engineering and Economics.
Saving dialects from extinction
Professor Claudia Wich-Reif, Professor for the German Language and Linguistic Variation, is collaborating with colleagues from Paderborn University, the University of Münster and the University of Siegen to study how much dialect people in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) still speak nowadays. They are using linguistic characteristics to assign a specific location to their interviewees and see how widespread dialect words still are in this day and age. Their findings are being made available online as a kind of virtual museum of dialects that will preserve this unique cultural heritage for the future. Wich-Reif has been elected to the Class of Humanities. Her main teaching and research interests lie in historical syntax and morphology as well as the study of regional languages. She serves as a liaison professor for the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and is a member of the board of trustees of the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics (Fraunhofer-Institut für Kommunikation, Informationsverarbeitung und Ergonomie, FKIE) and a member of the TRAs Individuals and Societies and Present Pasts.
About the academy
The North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts was established in 1970 and has been the sole academy in Germany to incorporate the arts alongside the sciences since 2008. Its members engage in dialogue with one another as well as with decision-makers from the worlds of politics, business, industry and culture and with research and cultural institutions in Germany and further afield. Only figures who have “distinguished themselves through scientific or artistic achievements” can be admitted. The academy currently has 406 members, 285 full ones (who work in NRW) and 121 corresponding ones.
Visit https://www.awk.nrw/ for more information.
