Niklas Höhne

Höhne attended the RWTH Aachen University with a one year scholarship at INSA Lyon and received his master's degree in physics in 1997. From 1998 to 2001 he worked as staff member at the UNFCCC secretariat. In 2001 he joined Ecofys, a leading climate and energy consultancy. In 2005 he received his PhD from Department of Science, Technology and Society, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, for the dissertation on “What is next after the Kyoto Protocol – Assessment of options for international climate policy post 2012″.[1] In 2009 he became Director of Energy and Climate Policy at Ecofys. Together with colleagues he founded[2] in 2014 the NewClimate Institute, a non-profit research organization for climate policy. In 2017 he was appointed Special Professor[3] “Mitigation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions” at Wageningen University.

Already in his master's thesis "Photothermal deflection spectroscopy as a method to characterize solar cells based on amorphous silicon"[4] Höhne was devoted to the promotion of renewable energy. As programme officer at the UNFCCC secretariat from 1998 on he supported the negotiations on reporting under the Kyoto Protocol, projections of greenhouse gas emissions, fluorinated greenhouse gases and emissions from international transport. Höhne led studies related to the international climate change negotiations and national climate policies.

Höhne is author of the chapter on climate policies and international cooperation in the Fourth and Fifth Assessment Report from the IPCC.[5] The IPCC received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He is also author of the UNEP Emissions Gap reports from 2010 to 2018. He created the Climate Action Tracker that tracks commitments and actions of countries on climate change.[6]

His work with the Climate Action Tracker, the UNEP emissions gap reports and in two publications in Nature[7][8] significantly contributed to the understanding that all national targets taken together are not yet compatible with the goal of the Paris Agreement.

His PhD thesis work on sharing the effort of reducing greenhouse gas emissions between countries contains the statement that developed countries would need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% to 40% in 2020 compared to 1990 and 80% to 95% by 2050 to be compatible with limiting global temperature increase to 2 °C.[9][10][11]

• Kuramochi, T.; Höhne, N.; Schaeffer, M.; Cantzler, J.; Hare, B.; Deng, Y.; Sterl, S.; Hagemann, M.; Rocha, M.; Yanguas-Parra, P.A.; Mir, G.-U.-R.; Wong, L.; El-Laboudy, T.; Wouters, K.; Deryng, D.; Blok, K. (2018). "Ten key short-term sectoral benchmarks to limit warming to 1.5 °C". Clim. Policy. 18 (3): 287–305. doi:10.1080/14693062.2017.1397495. S2CID 158468991.
• NewClimate Institute, Germanwatch, Allianz SE, 2018. Allianz Climate and Energy Monitor 2018.
• Rogelj, J; den Elzen, M; Höhne, N; Fransen, T; Fekete, H; Winkler, H; et al. (2016). "Paris Agreement climate proposals need a boost to keep warming well below 2 °C" (PDF). Nature. 534 (7609): 631–639. doi:10.1038/nature18307. PMID 27357792. S2CID 205249514.
• UNEP, 2017. The Emissions Gap Report 2017. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Nairobi, Kenya. ISBN 978-92-9253-062-4
• Höhne, N.; den Elzen, M.G.J.; Escalante, D. (2014). "Regional GHG reduction targets based on effort sharing: a comparison of studies". Climate Policy. 14: 122–147. doi:10.1080/14693062.2014.849452. S2CID 154815226.
• Stavins, R.N., Zou, J., Brewer, T., Grand, M.C., Elzen, M. den, Finus, M., Gupta, J., Höhne, N., Lee, M.-K., Michaelowa, A., Paterson, M., Ramakrishna, K., Wen, G., Wiener, J., Winkler, H., 2014. Chapter 13: International Cooperation: Agreements & Instruments, Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
• Dubash, N.K.; Hagemann, M.; Höhne, N.; Upadhyaya, P. (2013). "Developments in national climate change mitigation legislation and strategy". Climate Policy. 13 (6): 649–664. doi:10.1080/14693062.2013.845409. S2CID 154979624.
• Höhne, N.; Blum, H.; Fuglestvedt, J.; Skeie, R.B.; Kurosawa, A.; Hu, G.; Lowe, J.; Gohar, L.; Matthews, B.; Nioac de Salles, A.C.; Ellermann, C. (2011). "Contributions of individual countries' emissions to climate change and their uncertainty". Climatic Change. 106 (3): 359–391. doi:10.1007/s10584-010-9930-6. S2CID 59149563.
• den Elzen, M.G. J.; Höhne, N. (2010). "Sharing the reduction effort to limit global warming to 2 °C". Climate Policy. 10 (3): 247–260. doi:10.3763/cpol.2009.0678a. S2CID 152964846.
• Rogelj, J.; Nabel, J.; Chen, C.; Hare, W.; Markmann, K.; Meinshausen, M.; Schaeffer, M.; Macey, K.; Höhne, N. (2010). "Copenhagen Accord pledges are paltry". Nature. 464 (7292): 1126–1128. doi:10.1038/4641126a. PMID 20414291. S2CID 4359678.
• den Elzen, M.G.J.; Höhne, N. (2008). "Reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in Annex I and non-Annex I countries for meeting concentration stabilisation targets. An editorial comment". Climatic Change. 91: 249–274. doi:10.1007/s10584-008-9484-z.
• Gupta, S., Tirpak, D., Burger, N., Gupta, J., Höhne, N., Boncheva, A.I., Kanoan, G.M., Kolstad, C., Kruger, J.A., Michaelowa, A., Murase, S., Pershing, J., Saijo, T., Sari, A., 2007. Policies, Instruments and Co-operative Arrangements, Climate Change 2007: Mitigation. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,UK, and New York, NY, USA.
• Höhne, N.; den Elzen, M.G.J.; Weiss, M. (2006). "Common but differentiated convergence (CDC): a new conceptual approach to long-term climate policy". Climate Policy. 6 (2): 181–199. doi:10.3763/cpol.2006.0610.
• Höhne, N., 2005. What is next after the Kyoto Protocol? Assessment of options for international climate policy post 2012. PhD thesis, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands. ISBN 90-739-5893-8, Revised version published in 2006 at Techne Press, Amsterdam as ISBN 90-8594-005-2.
• Höhne, N., den Elzen, M., Rogelj, J., Metz, B., Fransen, T., Kuramochi, T., Olhoff, A., Alcamo, J., Winkler, H., Fu, S., Schaeffer, M., Schaeffer, R., Peters, G., Maxwell, S., Dubash, N. (2020). "Emissions: world has four times the work or one-third of the time". Nature. 579: 25-27.