Timo Kaphengst
Timo Kaphengst is a Senior Fellow at Ecologic Institute, where he serves as the coordinator of biodiversity and forest research. Focusing on environmental economics, he addresses international and European biodiversity policies, the impacts of land use and land use change, and biomass use for energy generation. He works in German and English and has knowledge of French and Italian.
Timo Kaphengst is particularly interested in the sustainable use of natural resources and how it relates to biodiversity conservation and climate policy. His projects at Ecologic Institute have covered a wide range of topics, including economic assessments of biodiversity and ecosystem services, the possible design of an international land use policy, and the social aspects of the production of biofuels. Moreover, his work has increasingly focused on transition processes towards a more sustainable society and the accompanying behavioral changes.
Before joining Ecologic Institute, Timo worked on a project that dealt with modeling regional biomass potentials for biofuels at the Leibniz-Institute of Agricultural Engineering in Potsdam (ATB). In this project, he was responsible for microeconomic aspects of biomass production.
Timo Kaphengst studied landscape ecology and nature conservation at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University of Greifswald (Germany). Here, he also developed his interest in theoretical and applied aspects of environmental ethics. During research trips to South Africa and Azerbaijan he also researched the ecological impacts on bird species diversity caused by habitat fragmentation and intensive land use.
Making use of his expertise in a variety of fields, Timo Kaphengst regularly gives lectures at universities and presentations to civil society organizations on the environmental and social aspects of various policies. Moreover, he is a member of the scientific advisory board of two current projects on social-ecological research (SÖF): Biofuel as Social Fuel and Renewable Energy Regions.