Special emphasis is put on analyzing and supporting technological and social innovations that decouple the prosperity of economic growth from the use of natural resources.
[7] The Wuppertal Institute describes itself as an intermediary between science, economy and politics, meaning that its sustainability research design is application-oriented.
An International Advisory Board[10] stands for the independence and the Institute's scientific quality and provides advice concerning strategic basic research issues.
[12] The later Federal President Johannes Rau (SPD) gave significant support to the founding when he was still Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia.
[12] The Institute's mission – formulated in its partnership agreement – was, first of all, to "promote measures and initiatives to secure the climate situation, to improve the environment and to save energy, as an interface between the scientific pursuit of knowledge and its practical application”.
Efficiency is the cornerstone of the book Factor Four - Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Amory and Hunter Lovins (Rocky Mountain Institute, US).
They assembled fifty examples of successful products using half the usual amount of natural resources, including hypercars, "Passivhaus", superwindows, long-lasting furniture, and a summer holiday in the Austrian Alps.
In 2001, the Tokyo-based Takeda Foundation awarded Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker and Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek a price worth one hundred million Japanese yen for their concepts "Factor Four", "MIPS" and "ecological rucksack", an expression of the Wuppertal Institute's international recognition.
The 1995 report Zukunftsfähiges Deutschland (published as “Greening the North”), commissioned by BUND and Misereor, was to remedy this: The Wuppertal Institute team, headed by Reinhard Loske and Raimund Bleischwitz, pioneered a new methodology.
Prof. Dr. Wolfang Sachs, a scientist of the Wuppertal Institute, member of the Club of Rome, and lead author at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), directed the study “Sustainable Germany in a Globalized World”.
The institute's environmental policy tasks are still important and worthy of support, but the concrete work suffers from serious conceptual deficiencies, said the council.
[12] In August 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Wuppertal Institute jointly founded the Center on Sustainable Consumption and Production (CSCP).
Based on the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Germany by 80 percent by 2050, the Wuppertal Institute has developed various long-term scenarios for the German energy system.
The quest to live and work in a way that conserves resources often raises questions that cannot be answered by one area of policy alone or by a single scientific discipline.
Its interdisciplinary research teams bring together the expertise of scientists and economists as well as geographers and spatial planners, engineers, philosophers, and historians.
The Institute's main research areas at the international level include the energy and industry system transitions, global climate governance, the low-carbon urban transformation (incl.
[13] In its scientific activities, the Institute advises ministries at the federal and state level as well as the European Union and is thus frequently in the public eye.
Under the European Union's Ecodesign Directive, manufacturers will be required to make batteries and display replaceable and offer spare parts or updates for a minimum period.
The Wuppertal Institute intensively accompanied the Federal Ministry of the Environment in the preparation of the environmental digital agenda and provided scientific advice.
In the fields of energy and mobility, it explores what technical and social innovations will facilitate the transition to sustainable structures, what implications this process has and what chances it offers.
It sees key challenges in the decarbonization of energy systems, the climate-friendly restructuring of energy-intensive industries, and the sustainable modernization of our cities.
The research focuses on the social-ecological balance of entrepreneurial, social, and technological changes and innovations in line with the implementation of the United Nations' international Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).