IDOS researcher Dr Gabriela Iacobuţă has received the dissertation prize of the Johannes-Rau-Forschungsgemeinschaft (JRF) awarded for the year 2022.
©JRF
The Board of Trustees of the Johannes-Rau-Forschungsgemeinschaft (JRF) has awarded the dissertation prizes for the years 2022 and 2023 for the second time. For the year 2022, Dr Gabriela Iacobuţă from the JRF member institute German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) was awarded. With her dissertation at Wageningen University entitled „Enablers of ambitious climate action: challenges and opportunities for climate and sustainable development“, she has made a significant contribution to international and national climate protection and sustainability policies. Climate change, with its far-reaching impacts on society as a whole and on many sub-sectors (health, economy, migration, agriculture, water security, etc.), is one of the key challenges for the future that can only be met with technological and organisational measures in the context of intensified international cooperation. Against this background, Dr Iacobuţă has purposefully developed several tools in her work that can be applied by different actors (e.g. UN agencies, climate negotiators, governmental and non-governmental actors) to pursue climate protection goals even more effectively. In this sense, her work also ensures a direct transfer of knowledge from scientific research to practice. Moreover, as the dissertation goes beyond scientific excellence in an interdisciplinary field to address the interface of climate protection and sustainable development, it is a particular expression of the JRF’s values and ambitions. The research on which the dissertation is based was largely carried out within the framework of the „Klimalog“ project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
The dissertation prize for 2023 was awarded to Mr Valentin Espert from the JRF Institute Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy. The prizes, each worth 2,000 euros, were awarded by the Chairman of the JRF Board of Trustees Karl Schultheis, at the JRF Annual Celebration on 24 April 2023 in Düsseldorf. The prize promotes young researchers within the JRF and the transfer of knowledge from university research into practice via the respective JRF institute. The selection jury consisted of the chairs of the JRF Board of Trustees in both years.
