Helga Weisz facts for kids
Helga Weisz (born in 1961 in Villach, Austria) is a smart scientist from Austria. She studies how humans use resources and how this affects our planet. She is a professor at Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany. She also leads a special research group at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). This group looks at how our society uses materials and energy, and what impact that has.
Her Journey
Helga Weisz loved learning about science from a young age. She studied microbiology at the University of Vienna and earned her master's degree in 1995. Microbiology is the study of tiny living things like bacteria. Later, she got her doctorate from Humboldt University in Berlin in 2002. This means she completed a very high level of study.
She also became a professor at Alpen-Adria University in 2006. She worked at a research center in Vienna for many years. Helga Weisz has also been a visiting professor at other famous universities. These include the University of St. Gallen and Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. From 2009 to 2018, she helped lead important research groups at PIK. These groups studied how climate change affects us and how we can understand these big problems.
What She Studies
Helga Weisz's main work is about something called "social metabolism." This sounds complicated, but it's about how our society uses natural resources. It looks at how we get raw materials and energy. Then, it studies how we turn these into goods and services we use every day. Finally, it examines how we deal with them as waste, pollution, and heat. All these steps together are what she calls social metabolism.
Helga Weisz is also very active in talking about the climate crisis. She helps people understand how we can deal with climate change. In 2017, she published a study about reducing the carbon footprint of cities. A carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gases caused by an organization, event, or product. She said that cities around the world need to measure all their emissions. This includes pollution made locally and pollution from things they import. Only then can cities reach their goals to help limit global warming.
