Although Professor Klaus Butterbach-Bahl was born in Germany, he has spent many years working in the yellow brick buildings of Aarhus University.

Here, he heads the Land-CRAFT research center, where he and 40 fellow researchers are looking for sustainable alternatives to current agricultural practices.

It is his work mapping how agriculture contributes to climate change through greenhouse gas emissions, and his proposed solutions, that have earned him the Nobel Sustainability Award.

Established by the descendants of Alfred Nobel's brother, Ludvig, the prize has been awarded since 2022 to researchers making significant contributions to sustainable development. It is unrelated to the prestigious Nobel Prize awarded annually in Stockholm.

Nevertheless, Klaus Butterbach-Bahl considers it an important recognition of his work.

- I was really delighted to hear the news. Although it won't change anything about my research, it's nice to be recognized for what I've dedicated the last 30 years of my life to, he says.

Nobel Sustainability Award

Behind the award is the Nobel Sustainability Trust, founded by five descendants of Alfred Nobel's brother, Ludvig.

Like his brother, Ludvig was an active businessman and inventor. He established the Russian oil and gas industry in the 19th century, and he invented oil tankers, improved oil refineries, and pipelines. At his death in 1888, he was one of the richest men in the world.

The Nobel Sustainability Award was first awarded in 2022, and each recipient receives 1.3 million Swedish kronor.

The awards will be presented on November 20th and 21st in San Francisco.

Didn't plan to become a professor

Klaus Butterbach-Bahl didn't initially plan to become a researcher.

As a student in Germany in the 1980s, he preferred the private sector, where the pay was much better. However, fate intervened.

In his own words, it was wanderlust that drew him into the world of research. More or less by chance.

- I wanted to travel, and the cheapest way to do that was to study abroad. So, I arranged a study trip to China, but when one of my professors heard about it, he persuaded me to do a research project there, he says.

While in China, Klaus Butterbach-Bahl investigated how heavy rain affects soil erosion.

Upon returning to Germany, a PhD position became available. The position involved studying methane emissions from rice paddies, a research area about which little was known at the time.

He got the position, and the academic world has held onto him ever since.

Klaus Butterbach-Bahl was born in Germany. Over the course of his career, he has lived in many places, such as China and Africa. In recent years, however, he has been based in Aarhus.

No One Was Talking About It

In the mid-1990s, when Klaus Butterbach-Bahl began his research, people rarely talked about green transition and sustainability. In fact, there were hardly any discussions about these issues outside narrow scientific circles.

- This was several years before the Kyoto Protocol, which really put climate change on the agenda. There was some talk about planetary boundaries, but few took it seriously.

- Today, we feel the consequences all the time. Take the floods in Eastern Europe or the unusually warm late summer in Denmark. Climate change is here, and we must transition our society if we are to survive.

Over the 30 years that Klaus Butterbach-Bahl has been researching, we have thankfully become much wiser. This is partly due to his research, which has shown how different types of agriculture impact the climate.

Klaus Butterbach-Bahl has studied rice paddies in China, cattle farming in Africa, fields in Europe and the United States, and tropical forests in Australia, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Because, as he says, we need to focus on the big picture if we are to succeed in the green transition.

- I've been so fortunate to travel the world and do research projects. The challenges are pretty much the same everywhere. We need to find a way to produce food that doesn't burden the climate, he says.

Contact

Klaus Butterbach-Bahl
Professor and Center Director
Center for Landscape Research in Sustainable Agricultural Futures (Land-CRAFT) at Aarhus University
Email: klaus.butterbach-bahl@agro.au.dk
Tel: +45 93 50 82 38

Jeppe Kyhne Knudsen
Journalist and Science Communicator
Faculty of Technical Sciences at Aarhus University
Email: jkk@au.dk
Tel: +45 93 50 81 48