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06/07/2021 - Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director and emeritus of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research PIK, today received the Grand Cross of Merit of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany today. Under the motto "Nature - Environment - Climate Protection", Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier honored Schellnhuber and five other citizens with the Order of Merit in Bellevue Palace for their outstanding commitment to environmental protection.

04/21/2021- Reconstructing our climate: On the occasion of the upcoming "Earth Day", Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, called for a green Bauhaus movement for the 21st century. He presented the "Building House of the Earth" initiative, which he co-founded, together with the architect Annette Hillebrandt and the President of the German Federal Environment Agency Dirk Messner at Berlin's Federal Press Conference today. Schellnhuber argues for the substitution of reinforced concrete with organic building materials and presented strategies for sustainable housing.

10/14/2020 - While the ongoing Corona pandemic continues to threaten millions of lives around the world, the first half of 2020 saw an unprecedented decline in CO2 emissions – larger than during the financial crisis of 2008, the oil crisis of 1979, or even World War II. An international team of researchers has found that in the first six months of this year, 8.8 percent less carbon dioxide were emitted than in the same period in 2019 – a total decrease of 1551 million tonnes. The groundbreaking study not only offers a much more precise look at COVID-19’s impact on global energy consumption than previous analyses. It also suggests what fundamental steps could be taken to stabilize the global climate in the aftermath of the pandemic.

09/10/2020 - Tree rings exaggerate, a team of researchers finds. Scientists deduce historical climatic conditions for the past hundreds of years from the width of the annual growth rings of trees. Previous temperature reconstructions from the annual tree rings are however to some extent inaccurate, according to a new study published in Climate Dynamics. Tree rings overstate the natural climatic variations of past centuries. A comparison of data from church and city archives shows that the climate has developed much more evenly. This in turn provides further evidence of how extraordinary modern human-made warming really is.

05/11/2012 - German chancellor Angela Merkel has warned about the consequences of unabated climate change and called on scientists to keep on pushing this topic. “You should be persistent and sometimes get on politicians nerves,” Merkel said at a symposium of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WGBU) which was founded 20 years ago. Coming to a worldwide agreement on limiting global warming to two degrees would be difficult, and the energy transition would ask for the willingness for change from the German public, the chancellor said. However, not doing anything is no option, she said: “All progress is of little use if we react too slowly. That’s why we should be aware of what is going to happen if nothing happens now. And that is going to be bitter.”

03/08/2010 - Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), has been appointed to the position of External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). The election to the external faculty recognizes Schellnhubers “many contributions to science and the SFI research effort”. At the US institution a transdisciplinary research community, working in the field of complexity science, investigates physical, computational, biological, and social systems. The term of the appointment is January 2010 through June 2013.