ÌÇÐÄVolg

Ivo Wallimann-Helmer

Prof. Dr. phil. in Environmental Humanities, Director of the UniFR_ESH institute

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 ivo.wallimann-helmer@unifr.ch
 +41 26 300 8826
 

  • Professor, Department of Geosciences
    PER 14 bu. 3.333.2
    Ch. du Musée 4
    1700 Fribourg
     
    PER 14, 3.333.2
     

    Hours of reception:
    Monday: 10:30-16:00
    Tuesday: 09:00-17:00
    Friday: 09:00-16:00

    Nach Vereinbarung / Sur rendez-vous / By appointment (environment@unifr.ch)

     
    +41 26 300 8826
     

The core areas of my work investigate conceptual and normative issues of justice in climate action and environmental protection, technological innovation for sustainability, and the fair differentiation of responsibilities in environmental practice and most recently food systems. My key interest concerns the conceptual conflicts between the global and intergenerational dimensions of these challenges and the local and temporal differentiations of responsibilities between relevant agents. For further information about my current projects, please visit: /env/en/research/

Biography

ÌÇÐÄVolg in philosophy and German language and literature in Zurich and Berlin. 2010 PhD thesis on the ideal of equality of opportunity. 2004-2012 various positions at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Zurich in practical Philosophy. 2009-2019 lecturer for ethics, political philosophy, climate ethics, medical ethics and ethical decision-making at various universities and technical colleges. 2012-2015 post-doc at the Center for Ethics at the University of Zurich. 2010-2018 managing director of the program Advanced ÌÇÐÄVolg in Applied Ethics of the University of Zurich. Since 2018 Professor for Environmental Humanities at the ÌÇÐÄVolg and since 2019 the director of the UniFR_ESH Institute.

Research and publications

  • Publications
    101 publications


    Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (2025) | Journal article

    , in EurSafe2024 Proceedings
    Ivo Wallimann-Helmer, Kräuchi S. (2024), ISBN: 978-90-04-71550-9 | Book chapter

    , in EurSafe2024 Proceedings
    Ivo Wallimann-Helmer (2024), ISBN: 978-90-04-71550-9 | Book chapter


    Environmental Ethics (2024) | Journal article

    The Ethics of Carbon Dioxide Removal Technologies
    Ivo Wallimann-Helmer, Clare Heyward, Dominic Lenzi , Schübel Hanna (Frontiers in Climate, 2024) | Book


    Le Climatoscope (2024) | Journal article


    Ivo Wallimann-Helmer, Ivo Wallimann-Helmer (2024) | Thesis


    GAIA - Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society (2023) | Journal article


    Le Climatoscope (2023) | Journal article


    Global Environmental Politics (2023) | Journal article

  • Research projects

    EurSafe 2021: Justice and Food Security in a Changing Climate
    Status: Completed

    Start 01.05.2021
    End 31.07.2021
    Funding SNSF 
    The 2021 Conference of the European Society for Agriculture and Food Ethics (EurSafe) in Fribourg focuses on the ethical issues concerning food security in times of a changing climate. the global community aims to end hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. However, the number of chronically undernourished people increases continuously, and ongoing climate change is expected to aggravate the situation even more. Consequently, there is an urgent need for mitigation and adaptation strategies that reduce global emissions and readjust human systems to changing climatic conditions. Such strategies, however, come with their own challenges and could possibly interfere with the goal of food security, as the space for new technologies directly competes with the need for agricultural land. The papers and presentations of the EurSafe 2021 Conference will discuss these potential conflicts and synergies between food security and climate policies from an ethical perspective, following four core areas: (1) Climate mitigation and food security (2) Geoengineering, agriculture and land (3) Adapting agriculture to sustain food security (4) Animal ethics, veterinary ethics and food security Reflecting the ethical and social implications of climate change for food security is irremissible for informed decision-making within research and public policy. The conference aims to promote interdisciplinary and international exchange and provide a key step forward in providing solutions to these challenges.

    Principles for Ethical Decision-Making in Environmental Practice
    Status: Ongoing

    Start 01.04.2021
    End 28.02.2026
    Funding SNSF 
    Humanity is facing as many environmental challenges as ever before in its history. These urgent challenges range from anthropogenic climate change to resource depletion and demand immediate action. Such action raises major ethical concerns and conflicts involving diverse parties with often conflicting sustainability goals and interests. However, environmental ethics to date has mainly been preoccupied with general concerns such as understanding our relation to nonhuman nature and has approached specific environmental challenges, if at all, in a piecemeal and unsystematic fashion. The aim of this project is to develop a general ethical framework for analyzing, systematizing, and deciding upon the ethical issues emerging in environmental politics, management, and administration. Building upon the methodology of principlism well known from medical ethics the ultimate outcome of this project will be a textbook that integrates applied exercises, forms, and checklists ready for practical use to make the framework widely available and usable in environmental science practice and education. Our investigation starts from the basis that it is possible to define a core set of ethical principles forming common morality in many diverse contexts of environmental governance and practice. This core set of principles determines how to decide ethical conflicts when implementing sustainability goals in various governance contexts. Principlism holds that, depending on the context, the core set of principles must be specified and weighted differently, leading to different moral duties. In order to verify whether principlism as a methodology can be a general tool for ethical decision-making in environmental governance and exactly what principles it stipulates, we will investigate three case studies. Taken together, their analysis contributes to the final formulation of the framework for ethical decision-making. We start our investigation from the hypothesis that four principles extensively discussed in environmental ethical literature and highly relevant in international politics form the core set of ethical principles in environmental practice: A) the polluter-pays principle, B) the ability-to-pay principle, C) the equal-per-capita principle, and D) the procedural-involvement principle, meaning the fair democratic involvement of those affected. We will apply and reformulate these four principles in three case studies and different fields of environmental ethics and policy: 1. Climate Adaptation / Loss and Damage: The first case study concerns adaptation and loss and damage policy in reaction to increased environmental risks due to climate change. 2. Biodiversity and Alien Species: The second case study investigates the challenge of alien species management and the preservation of biodiversity in Europe and globally. 3. Wildlife protection and conservation: The third case study deals with wildlife protection and conservation with a special focus on cases in Namibia, where several competing wildlife conservation practices potentially cause varying ethical conflicts.

Teaching and courses

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