Draft:Daniel Heyen

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Daniel Heyen (born 7 June 1981 in Köln) is a German environmental economist and university professor. He holds the Chair of Environmental Economics at the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau in Germany. Heyen's work focuses on decision-making under uncertainty and the governance of climate engineering. He is known for contributions to the economics of geoengineering, particularly solar radiation management (SRM), and for his academic publications on the role of risk, ambiguity, and precaution in climate policy.

Academic career

Heyen studied physics and mathematics at Heidelberg University, earning a diploma (equivalent to an M.Sc.) in mathematics in 2009. He pursued his doctoral studies at the same institution under the interdisciplinary Marsilius-Kolleg project “The Global Governance of Climate Engineering,” receiving his Ph.D. in economics (Dr. rer. pol.) in 2015. His dissertation, titled Five Essays in the Economics of Climate Engineering, Research, and Regulation under Uncertainty, comprised five self-contained studies on geoengineering policy and decision theory.

Following his doctorate, Heyen worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and later at the Chair of Integrative Risk Management and Economics at ETH Zurich. In 2021, he was appointed Professor of Environmental Economics at RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau. He is also a Fellow of the CESifo Research Network and an associate researcher affiliated with ETH Zurich. Heyen is a member of the Standing Field Committee for Environmental and Resource Economics of the German Economic Association (AURÖ).

Research contributions

Heyen’s research centres on the economics of climate change, with a focus on decision-making under uncertainty and the governance of emerging climate-engineering technologies, notably solar radiation management.

He has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Environmental and Resource Economics, Climatic Change, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Theory and Decision, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Science, and Nature Communications. His work explores SRM’s strategic implications for mitigation incentives, international research dynamics and distributional effects, as well as how precautionary regulatory approaches shape information acquisition. Heyen also contributes to interdisciplinary German initiatives that address the social, legal and ethical dimensions of climate intervention.

A 2025 feature in the RPTU research magazine portrays Heyen’s work as focusing on how low costs and high immediacy of solar geoengineering could alter international power relations and create “a climate policy balance of terror” if governance remains weak.

Reception

Heyen has been quoted by German media outlets for his expertise on the risks, ethics, and governance of climate intervention technologies.

His analysis of “counter-geoengineering” scenarios—where one state attempts to neutralise another state’s solar geoengineering through opposing interventions—has received attention in the German press. In a 2017 article on climate engineering in the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Heyen is cited for modelling how such countermeasures can lead to an arms-race-like escalation in climate intervention, with risks of severe side effects even if global temperature averages offset.

In November 2021, the Swiss public broadcaster SRF 2 Kultur featured Heyen in its programme Wissenschaftsmagazin in a dedicated segment on the an article he co-authored and published in Science. Heyen argued in the segment that solar geoengineering is a “dangerous, hard-to-assess technology” that might nevertheless gain salience as global warming progresses. The same article was also covered by the think tank Resources for the Future.

In October 2024, the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel published a joint expert piece on geoengineering that included Heyen as a commentator. Heyen outlined the chances and risks of solar geoengineering research, stressing that better knowledge is needed before any policy decisions are made.

In an October 2024 interview with SWR Kultur, Heyen discussed new ethical guidelines for geoengineering research by the American Geophysical Union. He welcomed the initiative, highlighting its emphasis on transparency, public participation, and framing geoengineering as a potential complement—not a substitute—for emissions reduction. However, he warned that ethical demands could be misused to block legitimate research, arguing that “not researching is also a risky decision”.

Web links

• Daniel Heyen on the RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau website
• Daniel Heyen personal website