Honorary President of the Board

Professor Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek (1932 – 2019) was founder and Director of the Factor 10 Institute and Honorary President of the World Resources Forum.
The Factor 10 Institute has been created to provide practical support for achieving significant advances in sustainable value creation, in particular through increases in resource productivity throughout the economy.

From 1992 to 1997 together with Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker he headed the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy.
Schmidt-Bleek is considered an authority on the topics of “resource productivity” and “dematerialization”. In 1994 he came up with the concept of the “Ecological rucksack” and in 1998 he developed the unit Material-Input per Service Unit (MIPS) as a measure for the assessment of environmental impacts of a product.
Schmidt-Bleek is author of numerous books and publications. He was member of the Lindau Group.

An overview of his presentations at the World Resources Forum in Davos can be found here.