International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEAS

Academician

Almut Arneth

Profile:

Elected an Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences (IEAS) on 23 June 2015, Professor Almut Arneth is a leading German ecosystem scientist whose research has contributed substantially to the global understanding of climate change, biodiversity, and land-use dynamics. Trained as a biologist with a specialisation in plant ecophysiology, she received her Ph.D. in Environmental Physics from Lincoln University, New Zealand, in 1998. Following postdoctoral research at Landcare Research in New Zealand, the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, she served as Professor at Lund University, Sweden, from 2004 to 2012. Since 2012, she has been Professor and Head of the Division of Ecosystem–Atmosphere Interactions at the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research – Atmospheric Environmental Research (IMK-IFU), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where she also leads the Global Land Ecosystems Modelling Group. Her scientific contributions have been recognised by the 2022 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG), Germany’s highest research award, and the Order of Merit of the State of Baden-Württemberg (2024). She is also a member of Academia Europaea and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

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Professor Arneth’s research centres on the interactions between terrestrial ecosystems and the climate system, particularly the effects of land-use change, rising atmospheric CO₂, and global warming on biogeochemical cycles, vegetation dynamics, and biodiversity. Through dynamic global vegetation modelling and socio-ecological approaches, she has demonstrated the importance of terrestrial biogeochemical feedbacks in the climate system and provided the first global process-based assessment of plant isoprene emissions under environmental change. She has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, with approximately 15,000 citations and an h-index of 62, and is consistently recognised among the world’s highly cited researchers. Her influence extends to international climate and biodiversity assessment, having served as Coordinating Lead Author of the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land and the IPBES Global Assessment, as well as Lead Author of the joint IPBES–IPCC workshop report on biodiversity and climate change. Her representative publications in Nature Climate Change, Nature Geoscience, and Global Environmental Change address land-use emissions, terrestrial climate feedbacks, dietary transitions and biodiversity, land-system responses to climate targets, and the integration of human decision-making into land-based mitigation and adaptation, reflecting her sustained contribution to linking ecosystem science with global climate and sustainability policy.