Erik Gawel is an economist specialising in environmental and energy economics. He is Professor of Economics, with a focus on Environmental Institutional Economics, at Leipzig University and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ). He heads the UFZ Department of Economics and Leipzig University’s Institute for Infrastructure and Resources Management.
His research examines the economic dimensions of climate change, the environmental effects of the energy transition, water resources management, infrastructure and public finance. His projects address questions such as renewable energy policy, the costs of environmental protection and the institutions needed to manage resources sustainably.
Before joining Leipzig and UFZ in 2008, he held a professorship in Frankfurt and worked with research institutions and the German Bundestag’s commission on sustainable energy supply. He has been a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2015.
At Trieste Photo Days 2026, Gawel contributes an environmental economics perspective to the guided tour of Marcel van Beek’s The Future Was Extracted Here, connecting its photographs of coal landscapes with questions of energy, urban development and environmental transformation.
