BTU Science Club celebrated premiere

About 40 guests - primarily professors of the BTU, but also representatives of the State Chancellery, the economy and the BTU Sponsors' Association - accepted the invitation of BTU President Prof. Dr. Gesine Grande and the Vice President for Research and Transfer, Prof. Dr. Michael Hübner, to network and at the same time discuss current and future-oriented topics. What better place could there have been for such an exchange than the light-filled foyer on the 7th floor of the state-of-the-art IKMZ?

"The BTU is in a rapid development phase. We have so much planned - and for that we need new formats. That's why we created the BTU Science Club, to make people, expertise, and research projects at the BTU more visible, which we often know too little about among ourselves," said Gesine Grande in her welcoming speech. "With the new BTU Science Club, we want to promote interdisciplinary exchange, spotlight individual topics from our four profile lines, and thus present the BTU's special diversity." She thanked in particular the BTU Sponsors' Association and its chairman, Jörg Waniek, for their financial support to carry out this new event format.

For the afternoon's scientific discourse, Prof. Dr. Bernd Hirschl delivered a fact-filled presentation entitled "Brandenburg on the Way to Climate Neutrality - Status, Challenges and Perspectives." Prof. Hirschl heads the Department of Management of Regional Energy Supply Structures at the BTU and is also head and founder of the "Sustainable Energy Management and Climate Protection" department at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) in Berlin.

For the first time in Brandenburg, a climate plan is to be drawn up by the state government under the leadership of the Ministry of Agriculture, Environment and Climate Protection and adopted for the first time in order to achieve the climate neutrality target already adopted by 2045. The climate plan is intended to provide an overarching framework for the climate-relevant individual strategies of all departments.

On behalf of the state government, Prof. Hirschl and his team are preparing a scientific report on the development of this cross-departmental climate protection strategy. The results will be discussed in a broad participation process with many social actors. In his lecture, he presented sobering results of his interim report, such as that, according to the current status, the 1.5 degree target - i.e. the goal of limiting the man-made global temperature increase due to the greenhouse effect to 1.5 degrees - can no longer be achieved in Brandenburg and thus everything must be done to remain at least "well below two degrees", as demanded by the Paris Climate Agreement.

Bernd Hirschl outlined challenges as well as possible recommended measures for the climate plan and gave the participants of the 1st BTU Science Club insights into previously unpublished data. The ensuing discussion, moderated by Michael Hübner, was correspondingly lively and controversial, and continued during the social evening. "This is exactly what we had hoped for," he summed up happily at the end of the event, "that colleagues across faculties would engage in more discussion and that this would also result in new interdisciplinary research projects." For this, there is no need for a fireplace or cigars - just an inspiring environment.