GermanZero: Crafting a climate action masterplan

A pro bono project that originated at a cocktail party 

At a late-night, high-level reception at Frankfurt Book Fair 2019, Fabian met Kai Matthiesen, managing partner at Metaplan Consulting. They had previously collaborated on the development of a local sustainability Agenda for Blankenese, a municipal district of Hamburg. It had been Fabian´s part to document the purpose- and mission-finding discussion and fit it into a compact document. Kai told Fabian about GermanZero, a new initiative for climate neutrality in Germany. They would organize a 3-day “hackathon” with some of the best German environmental experts and scientists, facilitated by Metaplan’s professional facilitators to come up with a rough plan on how to achieve climate neutrality in Germany by 2030.

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Fabian agreed, not knowing what he had gotten himself into.

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After three highly intensive workdays and -nights with the crowd of ca. 30 high-calibre experts, the time of structuring and editing came.

How can we manage to make Germany climate neutral by 2030?

As an “editor in chief”, it was Fabian’s task to facilitate a consensus between experts with diverging views on specific topics, to coordinate a team of ca.10 other contributing experts and editors and to put everything into a homogenous language and shape. The resulting 64-page”1,5-Degree Climate Action Plan for Germany” was presented to the press in December 2019, resulting in a considerable media coverage, for example on taz, Deutschlandfunk or Berliner Morgenpost, strongly supported by Klaudia Kelleh´s PR Work.

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Later, GermanZero was endorsed and promoted by German Media Stars like Rezo, Jan Josef Liefers, Carolin Kebekus. Jan Delay and many many others, as expressed in the GermanZero YouTube Video:

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