Germanwatch | Christoph Bals: The climate policy thought leader

Germanwatch founder Christoph Bals is one of the most important voices in the German climate protection movement. Photo: IMAGO / photothek “Bigger, younger and more female” is to become the leadership of Germanwatch. Jennifer Tollmann and Lutz Weischer have now started their new tasks as managing directors of politics at the environmental and development organization. Christoph Bals is giving up this position at the end of the year and moving to the Future Capability Foundation, which is close to Germanwatch and, according to its statutes, wants to promote the preservation of the basis of life.

This means that one of the most colorful personalities in the local NGO scene and one of the pioneers of climate policy in Germany is leaving politics. Bals (born in 1960) was co-founder of Germanwatch in Bonn shortly after reunification. The organization saw itself as a counterweight against new nationalism and the feared ambition of a united Germany to become a great power. Their goal: as a think tank, to critically monitor the policies of industrialized nations with regard to the global south and environmental protection. The NGO's analyzes of the complex issue are not only precise and in-depth; For a long time they also had to think of the North-South conflict and the climate issue together as a unique selling point.

The fact that climate protection cannot be achieved without justice for the people of the global south has long been ignored, for example by environmental associations with large memberships. But negotiations at the major UN summits were repeatedly paralyzed as a result. Bals & Co. were among the first to point out that poor countries suffer most from the consequences of climate change. For two decades now, Germanwatch's climate risk index, published on the sidelines of UN summits, has been causing a stir. It's no wonder that he's already drawn criticism from the conservative press.

Bals’ political career was also quite unusual. He became involved in peace work for Northern Ireland early on. In 1986/87 he wrote his diploma thesis in Belfast on the role of the churches in the unrest and on peace policy approaches in the British part of the country. While studying theology, economics and philosophy, he also spent a semester at the Catholic faculty in Erfurt in 1984. In doing so, he made contacts with the GDR environmental movement, which later had political consequences: as advisors to the Modrow government, Bals and other colleagues gave impetus to an energy transition away from nuclear power and lignite-fired power generation, but also to the groundbreaking national park program approved by the Council of Ministers in 1990, with which seven percent of the GDR's area was placed under strict nature conservation.

However, such proximity to politics, but also to willing companies, is not without controversy in the climate movement: "Some people take this seriously," Bals once said a few years ago. “We rely on the politics of the best argument,” is his credo. Criticism alone is not enough for him. For example, he advocates “setting a framework for the financial market to force it not to cause any damage.”

It remains to be seen how these special features will be continued under the new management team. Germanwatch speaks of “difficult but also crucial times”. Bals himself remains optimistic in this regard: He says of his successors that “they will effectively continue what has been tried and tested and at the same time develop and implement important impulses of their own with the team.”

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