In last environment award as president, Steinmeier urges rethink of how Germans live
In Aachen, Germany's president presented the 500,000-euro German Environmental Prize to climate lawyer Roda Verheyen and engineer Klaus Vossenkaul.
Archive image · Photo: Kadellar / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier presented the German Environmental Prize of the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) in Aachen on Sunday, his last such ceremony before leaving office early next year, according to dpa. The 500,000-euro award is shared by Hamburg environmental lawyer Roda Verheyen and membrane filter engineer Klaus Vossenkaul from the Aachen region.
In his speech, Steinmeier called for climate protection to keep a high priority despite short-term political trends. "We know that we have to question our way of living and of doing business," he said. He pointed to last summer's forest fires, low river levels and, according to the Robert Koch Institute, 16,000 additional deaths.
Verheyen was a driving force behind the lawsuit that led Germany's Constitutional Court in 2021 to demand tougher climate targets. Referring to the 2.8 degrees of warming projected by the U.N., she told dpa: "We are putting ourselves in immense danger of wiping ourselves out." Vossenkaul is honored for membrane filters that he says can cut the energy needed for wastewater treatment by up to 90 percent.