Mourning for Prof Dr Harald Kächele

HNEE mourns the loss of Prof Dr Harald Kächele, who passed away last weekend at the age of 61 after a serious illness. He was committed to environmental protection for many years. Harald Kächele was an active and very successful volunteer in various advisory boards and environmental organisations. For more than two decades, he shaped the successful development of various organisations, including as Federal Chairman of Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH), Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the OroVerde Tropical Forest Foundation and the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND). Harald Kächele was appointed to the Chair of Environmental Economics at the Department of Landscape Management and Nature Conservation in 2000 - as part of a joint appointment with the Leibnitz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in Müncheberg - and has since taught on the Bachelor's programme in Landscape Management and Nature Conservation and the Master's programme in Regional Development and Nature Conservation.

Prof. Dr Jens Pape, long-time mentor and Dean of the Department of Landscape Management and Nature Conservation from 2011 to 2021: "He contributed his expertise, his experience and creative knowledge, but also his organisational skills in a 'clever and unpretentious' manner - two terms he liked to use - in a wide variety of contexts, including the establishment of the part-time Master's programme in Strategic Sustainability Management.

With Harald Kächele, we are not only losing a committed university lecturer and internationally active researcher, but also a dear colleague who wanted to make the world a little better every day with a twinkle in his eye and a lot of optimism at the university and in his voluntary work. We miss him very much!"