Brigitte Knopf

Dr. Brigitte Knopf is Secretary General of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change(MCC), located in Berlin. Her expertise is on German, European and global energy and climate policy.

Her recent work focusses on the implementation of the Paris Agreement at the German and international level. In the German context, her recent work focusses on introducing socially-balanced carbon pricing in Germany. She is co-author of MCC’s report on options for a carbon pricing reform in Germany, which was presented to the Climate Cabinet in July 2019. At the international level, she was recently a member of the UN Scientific Advisory Group, which was in involved in preparing the UN Climate Action Summit in September 2019. She was lead author of the chapter on fiscal policies for the low-carbon transition of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2018 and contributing author to IPCC’s Fifths Assessment Report. In the context of the G20 process, she develops strategies how carbon pricing could support not only climate change mitigation, but also finance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Before joining MCC in 2015, she was deputy head of the research domain Sustainable Solutions at the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and head of the group Energy Strategies Europe and Germany. She holds a PhD in physics. She led an international model comparison on the effects of technology choices on EU climate policy that explores EU's 2030 climate targets. She also coordinated one of the first global model comparisons of the technical feasibility of the 2°C target in 2010.

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