Ivo Wallimann-Helmer
Prof. Dr. phil. in Environmental Humanities, Director of the UniFR_ESH institute
ivo.wallimann-helmer@unifr.ch
+41 26 300 8826
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0548-6340
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Department Head,
Department of Geosciences
PER 14 bu. 3.333.2
Ch. du Musée 4
1700 Fribourg -
Professor,
Department of Geosciences
PER 14 bu. 3.333.2
Ch. du Musée 4
1700 FribourgPER 14, 3.333.2
Hours of reception:
Monday: 10:30-16:00
Tuesday: 09:00-17:00
Friday: 09:00-16:00Nach Vereinbarung / Sur rendez-vous / By appointment (environment@unifr.ch)
Biography
Studies 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 Studies in Applied Ethics of the University of Zurich. Since 2018 Professor for Environmental Humanities at the University of Fribourg and since 2019 the director of the UniFR_ESH Institute.
Research and publications
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Publications
147 publications
Defining health in One Health , in Farming the Future - Ethical Challenges in the Age of AI and Digitalization
Wallimann-Helmer, I. and Martin, A., ed. by Meijboom, Franck and Akıllı, Sinan (Brill | Wageningen Academic, 2026), ISBN: 978-90-04-77663-0 | Book chapterCultural rights and climate duties in the context of meat consumption , in Farming the Future - Ethical Challenges in the Age of AI and Digitalization
Barceló Rosario, D. and Wallimann-Helmer, I., ed. by Meijboom, Franck and Akıllı, Sinan (Brill | Wageningen Academic, 2026), ISBN: 978-90-04-77663-0 | Book chapterThe moral priority of forward-looking responsibility in alien species management , in Farming the Future - Ethical Challenges in the Age of AI and Digitalization
Wallimann-Helmer, I., ed. by Meijboom, Franck and Akıllı, Sinan (Brill | Wageningen Academic, 2026), ISBN: 978-90-04-77663-0 | Book chapterBlue Carbon Ecosystems: the ethical conflict between nature-based carbon sinks and local livelihoods , in Farming the Future - Ethical Challenges in the Age of AI and Digitalization
Sartor, V. and Wallimann-Helmer, I., ed. by Meijboom, Franck and Akıllı, Sinan (Brill | Wageningen Academic, 2026), ISBN: 978-90-04-77663-0 | Book chapterRecognizing Water Bodies as Subjects of Rights and Reversing Biodiversity Loss: A Comparative Case Study of Brazil and Switzerland
Gabrielle Tabares Fagundez, Ivo Wallimann-Helmer, (2026) | PreprintThe Triangular Affair of Sufficientarian Justice in Decarbonization and Biodiversity Protection
Ivo Wallimann-Helmer, (2026) | PreprintEinen Elefanten erschieβen? Plurale Weltbilder und Ethik in Umweltherausforderungen , in Ökologische Weltbilder
Wallimann-Helmer, Ivo, ed. by Ostheimer, Jochen (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2026), ISBN: 978-3-8376-7846-8 | Book chapterBrennpunkt Klima Schweiz. Ein Überblick über Entwicklung, Folgen und Handlungsmöglichkeiten
(2026) | Journal articleAuf dem Weg zu einer praktischen Klimaethik , in Zu den Prinzipien der Bioethik: Ausgewählte Texte zu einem modernen Klassiker
Voisard, Anthony and Wallimann-Helmer, Ivo, ed. by Lanzerath, Dirk and Bartmann, Marius and Halsband, Aurélie and Kurzböck, Niklas (Baden-Baden: Verlag Karl Alber (Nomos), 2026), ISBN: 978-3-495-98888-6 | Book chapterAdaptation limits as sufficiency entitlements of justice
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (2025) | Journal article -
Research projects
Scaling the Environment - Methods and Perspectives in the Environmental Humanities
Status: OngoingStart 01.12.2026 End 28.02.2027 Funding SNSF Open project sheet This workshop brings together Environmental Humanities researchers for interdisciplinary exchanges about methods, especially relating to issues of scales. In the human-made world of the Anthropocene, environmental issues are entangled with social, political, and cultural norms, which makes the development of diverse and interdisciplinary methodologies a necessity. This workshop serves to facilitate them around the concepts of scale, the highly fluctuating and diverse spatial, temporal, and social spans on which environmental phenomena occur. Although scales are important in the all the different fields that constitute the Environmental Humanities, the current knowledge on the interplay between different methods and scale(s) is still limited. We will invite scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds to consider the following questions: On which spatial and temporal scales does my research operate? Which theoretical approaches are central to engaging with these scales? Which scales does my methodological approach privilege or foreground? Which scales does my method systematically exclude or render invisible? Participants will reflect on their methodological approaches to scales on the basis of these shared questions and, together as an interdisciplinary group, we will discuss and explore which similarities, differences, and potential synergies between them exist. The goals of this workshop are manifold: Firstly, we hope to contribute to a sharpening of conceptualizations of scale(s) within the different fields of Environmental Humanities. Secondly, we intend to induce interdisciplinary dialogues that lead to the common evolvement of Environmental Humanities methodologies. The ensuing reflections on the strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots of individual methodologies are, furthermore, crucial for the avoidance of biases, oversights and mistakes that might be common with specific methodologies. Thirdly, we want to further connect Swiss and International researchers in the field, which is a core task of the University of Fribourg Environmental Sciences and Humanities institute as the only such institute in Switzerland. Lastly, we also want to build connections between experienced and early career researchers. The workshop will consist of presentations by experienced researchers, followed by responses of PhD students with different disciplinary backgrounds and then general discussions. This structure ensures interdisciplinarity and international exchanges between researchers in different career stages. We will publish a special issue on methods and scales based on the results of the workshop in an open-access Environmental Humanities journal. The less tangible effects, however, are no less important: We expect that new (inter)national collaborations arise as an outcome that will further strengthen the yet young field, while also raising the international visibility of Swiss Environmental Humanities. EurSafe 2021: Justice and Food Security in a Changing Climate
Status: CompletedStart 01.05.2021 End 31.07.2021 Funding SNSF Open project sheet 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: CompletedStart 01.04.2021 End 28.02.2026 Funding SNSF Open project sheet 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.