Dr. Hermann E. Ott is heading the Berlin Office of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. Born in 1961, he studied law and politics in Munich, London and Berlin, attaining a doctorate in jurisprudence in 1997. He worked as defence lawyer and attorney from 1992 to 1994, joined the Wuppertal Institute as Senior Research Fellow in 1994 and later served as Director of its Climate Policy Division. From November 2000 to June 2001 he served in Policy Planning on foreign environmental policy at the German Foreign Office.

He is co-author, with Sebastian Oberthür, of a treatise on international climate policy: The Kyoto Protocol. International Climate Policy for the 21st Century, Springer 1999. A German translation was published in 2000 (with Leske+Budrich), a Japanese translation (Springer) in 2001. Dr Ott is author of many articles in reviewed and non-reviewed journals on climate policy, environmental policy and on global governance. He is co-author of Wuppertal Institute (Ed.): Fair Future. Limited Resources and Global Justice, and Wuppertal Institut: Zukunftsfähiges Deutschland in einer globalisierten Welt, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 2008. In addition, he is editor of Wege aus der Klimafalle. Neue Ziele, neue Allianzen, neue Technologien - was eine zukünftige Klimapolitik leisten muss; oekom Verlag 2008.