Germanwatch’s executive team is growing, becoming younger and more female in the process: Jennifer Tollmann and Lutz Weischer have today taken up their posts as Executive Directors for Politics at Germanwatch. They will take over from Christoph Bals, who is stepping down at the end of the year. Together with Executive Director for Administration Gerold Kier, they form the new executive board. Germanwatch is strengthening its strategic position and laying the groundwork to ensure that we can continue to effectively carry out our mission going, even in the face of growing global challenges.
With Jennifer Tollmann, Germanwatch is welcoming an experienced strategist to its executive leadership team. For more than a decade she has been shaping cooperation at the national, European, and global level to tackle the climate crisis. At the Federal Foreign Office, she played a key role in developing German and European climate foreign policy, coordinating cross-government strategies and diplomatic campaigns. In doing so, she collaborated at the highest level with European partners, emerging economies, and particularly vulnerable states, for example on the decision to establish a fund for responding to climate-related loss and damage, and on the adoption and implementation of global energy transition goals. She possesses both (geo-)political acumen and experience in building strong alliances between government, the business sector, civil society, and foundations.
Whilst Jennifer Tollmann brings a fresh, strategic perspective to the organisation, her co-director, Lutz Weischer, can draw on many years of leadership experience at Germanwatch and a thorough understanding of all the organisation’s key areas of work. From 2013 to 2019, he headed the International Climate Policy division; a role in which he led the organisation’s work on the negotiations for the Paris Agreement, among other responsibilities. Since 2020, as head of the Berlin office, he has shaped Germanwatch’s work on federal German policy. In addition to key issues such as the Supply Chain Act and the Federal Climate Change Act, he developed new areas of work for the organisation, including on multilateral development banks, international partnerships, and German-Chinese and well as European-Chinese climate-policy relations.
Christoph Bals, the outgoing Executive Director for Politics, will accompany the transition until the end of the year, as of when he will continue his cooperation with Germanwatch in a new role at the foundation “Stiftung Zukunftsfähigkeit” Christoph Bals has been working with Germanwatch since its establishment in 1991 and has shaped the organisation like few others, having held senior management positions for more than two decades.
With the handover of responsibility to the next generation of outstanding minds, an almost three-year process is coming to an end. Germanwatch is thus building on tried-and-tested strengths while creating space for new strategies and ideas.
Photo: Germanwatch e.V. | Larissa Neubauer
