8/2/2002
Dr Klaus Töpfer, Director of the United Nations Environment Programme

Dr Klaus Töpfer has achieved international recognition for both a national political career and his place within the United Nations system. Having held various ministerial positions within the German Bundestag, he is now the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. However, despite success as politician and as agency head, he started his career as neither. His first aspirations were academic.

Klaus Töpfer was born in 1938 in Waldenburg, Germany, After gaining the arbitur (school-leaving certificate) he spent a year in military service before joining the University of Münster, to study economics. He graduated in 1968 and gained a doctorate four years later. He worked as an assistant and later a lecturer at his old university before finally becoming a Head of the Economics Department. His career took on a more varied aspect in 1971 when he became a lecturer in the multi-disciplinary field of development policy. He also became the Head of the Planning Department in the State Chancellery of the Saarland.

By this time he had become a professor - and, perhaps more significantly, a member of the Council of Experts for Environmental Questions. Dr Töpfer's career had taken a significant turn. Having joined Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1972, he had become a member of the State Executive Committee by 1977, when he was appointed State Secretary at the Ministry for Social Affairs, Health and Environment of Rhineland-Palatinate. He held this position until 1985 - also serving as vice-chairman of the Federal Committee on Environmental Questions -before becoming the Minister for Environment and Health of Rhineland-Palatinate in 1987. In 1990 he was elected to the German Bundestag where he would stay for the next eight years - for five of these as the Federal Minister for Regional Planning, Building and Urban Development. This brought with it the unenviable task of co-ordinating the transfer of the Parliament and Federal Government to Berlin as part of the unification process.

Despite this enormous challenge, Dr Töpfer's expertise did not remain solely within the domestic sphere and in 1994 he served as Chairman of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. His performance in this role obviously made a significant impression and on retiring from German politics in 1998, Klaus Töpfer was invited to head the United Nations Environment Programme. Since then he has also been appointed as Director-General of the United Nations Office at Nairobi and more recently as Acting Executive-Director of the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat).

Dr Töpfer has received a number of honours and awards in recognition of his contribution to environmental expertise and understanding. Perhaps his greatest challenge lies ahead however with the forthcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg later this year.