This inspiring podcast from a former colleague at UCL brings to light the reality that climate change—and related endeavours—mark a long journey. We might have to face some “ugly situations”, but think about our grandparents and great-grandparents, this is our “Great War”, and we must fight long and hard to ensure life on earth remains

Professor Raimund Bleischwitz acted as the Deputy Director of the Institute for Sustainable Resources at University College London (UCL), from  2013 to 2018. From 2018 to 2021 he was the Director of UCL's Bartlett School of Environment Energy & Resources. In January 2022 Bleischwitz was appointed Scientific Director at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen, Germany.

Beginning in the German Parliament during the 1980s when, indeed, caring about the environment  was still in its infancy if one can believe, he then pursued a Ph.D. because he had several burning questions which he sought to answer through research.

His research and courses focus on the “triple challenge” of dealing with the economic, the socio-political, and the environmental dimensions of using the worlds resources, especially as they become more hotly contested the world over. Quite often there is a tendency for actors to focus on only one of these dimensions, either predominantly supply-oriented (“raw materials strategy”) or demand-oriented (“resource efficiency, “sustainable consumption and production”). Last, he has done much work on a hot topic, “rare earth materials”, which are key ingredients to modern technologies, foremost among these renewable energy technologies