Imme Scholz

Dr. Imme Scholz is Deputy Director of the German Development Institute (DIE – Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik). She is deputy chair of the German Council for Sustainable Development and a member of the German Committee of Sustainability Research in Future Earth. Between 2002-2009, she was head of the environmental department at DIE where she set up a team working on adaptation to climate change. She has published extensively on climate change and development; capacity development in environment; institutional development and environmental policy in developing countries; natural resource management, particularly sustainable forest use. In the 1980s, she studied sociology at the Free University of Berlin where she also obtained the degree of Dr. phil. for a thesis on the determinants for entrepreneurial innovation capacity in the Amazon tropical timber industry. She started her professional career as assistant to the economic attaché of the Chilean Embassy in Bonn (1990 – 1992) and became a research fellow at DIE in 1992. Between 1999 and 2002, she was on leave and worked as an environmental policy advisor in the Brazilian Amazon for German development cooperation.