Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

• 1. Introduction

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  The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research sits on a hill in the Brandenburg city of Potsdam, on a site called Telegrafenberg. That name carries its own quiet history: a place where signals were once sent across distances. Today the hill is where roughly 400 researchers send a very different kind of signal out into the world. The questions they work on include how tipping points in the climate system behave, how inequality shapes a society's ability to adapt, and whether humanity can find pathways toward what the institute calls a manageable climate future. How an institute founded in 1992 grew into one of the leading climate research bodies in the world, who shaped it, and what it actually produces day to day are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Founding and Leadership

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  Hans Joachim Schellnhuber founded PIK in 1992 and served as its first director for more than two decades. When Schellnhuber stepped down in 2018, the institute chose an unusual arrangement: two joint directors rather than one. Ottmar Edenhofer, an economist who had already co-chaired the IPCC working group on climate change mitigation from 2008 to 2015, took one of those seats. Johan Rockström, an Earth scientist who had previously led the Stockholm Resilience Centre, took the other. A third figure, Bettina Hörstrup, serves as administrative director, completing the governing board of three. The decision to pair a climate economist with an Earth scientist at the top reflects something structural about how PIK frames its work: natural science and policy analysis are not kept in separate rooms.

• 3. How the Science Is Organized

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  PIK organizes its research across four departments and seven Future Labs, each with a distinct remit. Research Department 1 handles Earth system science: the physical and biogeochemical processes that govern oceans, atmosphere, and biosphere. Its work is organized around four themes PIK helped establish, including tipping points, planetary boundaries, Earth system trajectories, and extreme weather events. Research Department 2 turns to resilience, examining how social and ecological systems persist, adapt, or transform under climate pressure. Department 3 looks at transformation pathways: integrated assessments of mitigation strategies, land use, energy systems, and the distributional effects that climate policy can create. The fourth department is devoted to complexity science, using machine learning, nonlinear methods, and game theory to model climate phenomena, abrupt transitions, and the dynamics of infrastructure networks. Six of the seven Future Labs are time-limited and face evaluation after five years; one permanent lab focuses on social metabolism, the continuous throughput of materials and energy that human societies require to function.

• 4. The IPCC Connection

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  Ottmar Edenhofer co-chaired the IPCC working group on climate change mitigation for seven years, from 2008 to 2015. That tenure placed a PIK figure at the center of the most authoritative international climate assessment process during a period when the scientific and policy communities were sharpening their understanding of what decarbonization would actually require. The relationship did not end there. In the IPCC's sixth assessment cycle, running from 2016 to 2022, PIK researchers contributed to two special reports: the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, published in 2017, and the Special Report on Climate Change and Land, published in 2019. Several PIK scientists served as chapter authors for the Sixth Assessment Report itself, which appeared across 2021 and 2022. That sustained presence across multiple IPCC cycles positions the institute as a consistent contributor to the scientific record that governments formally rely on when setting climate targets.

• 5. Funding and Institutional Standing

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  PIK operates as a non-profit and draws its core budget from two sources in roughly equal proportions: the Federal Republic of Germany and the Federal State of Brandenburg. In 2020, that institutional funding came to around 12.4 million euros. On top of that base, external project funding added approximately 14.4 million euros, the bulk of it from public programmes such as European Union research initiatives and the German Research Foundation. Membership in the Leibniz Association places PIK within a recognized network of German institutions performing research of high social relevance; that affiliation provides both legitimacy and a structural framework for the federal-state funding split. PIK also provides scientific advice to bodies including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organization, and the International Organization for Migration, as well as the Federal Government of Germany and the European Commission. The combination of public funding, Leibniz membership, and advisory relationships to major international institutions has given PIK a durable platform for translating research into policy-relevant guidance.

• 6. The Future Labs

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  The Game Theory and Networks Future Lab, established in January 2019, is a cross-institutional project shared between PIK and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. It is hosted within Research Department 4 and brings together researchers who apply game-theoretic models to international climate policy and sustainable resource management. The Future Lab on Security, Ethnic Conflicts and Migration represents PIK's formal entry into research on climate and human security, treating migration and displacement as potential drivers, outcomes, or mediating factors in conflict dynamics. A third lab examines public economics and climate finance, asking how short-term human well-being can be reconciled with long-term environmental sustainability. The permanent Social Metabolism and Impacts Lab focuses on the material flows that underpin modern societies: extraction, transformation into goods and services, and eventual return of materials to the environment as emissions and waste. A sixth lab addresses Earth resilience in what scientists call the Anthropocene, the current era of significant human influence on planetary systems, concentrating on the self-regulatory capacities that keep the Earth system stable. The lab on Inequality, Human Well-Being and Development rounds out the set by analyzing how inequality shapes both vulnerability to climate change and the responses societies mount against it. The five-year evaluation clock on the time-limited labs means PIK periodically reviews which research directions continue to justify dedicated teams.