The Berlin newspaper DER TAGESSPIEGEL introduced Sarah Wolf who contributes to the Green Growth research process since 2012. She is part of the Biocomputing Group of Freie Universität Berlin and head of the MATH+ junior research group on “Mathematics for Sustainability Transitions” since 2019.

The little calculators are very popular on the Internet: You push a little on the controls and see right away how giving up meat or switching to public transportation would improve your individual climate footprint.

The models that Sarah Wolf, mathematician and Head of a Junior Research Group, is working on at Freie Universität Berlin function in a very similar way. They also simulate what effects certain decisions or measures would have on the economy, society, and the environment.

The only difference is that these so-called agent-based models are much larger and more complex, as Sarah Wolf explains: “For example, we represent all people in Germany as a ‘synthetic population’. Thus, it is not just about the individual climate balance, but also about interactions between the decisions of many actors.”

Read the complete TAGESSPIEGEL article (in German only)