Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary at Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment, has announced he is leaving the civil service to become chief executive of the European Climate Foundation (ECF), a Hague-based organisation that has received grant funding from his own ministry.
The foundation’s supervisory board appointed Flasbarth as CEO on October 5, in a decision made public the following day.
The 64-year-old Social Democrat will take up the post on February 1, 2027, succeeding Laurence Tubiana, the French diplomat regarded as one of the architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The appointment is conditional on his exit from the civil service being completed.
He is expected to leave the ministry in early November, with Heike Henn, currently head of the department for international climate policy, lined up as his successor. That would put Henn in post only weeks before the COP31 UN climate conference.
The foundation Flasbarth will lead, established under Dutch law in 2008 and headquartered in The Hague, is one of the world’s most important funders of climate policy projects.
It distributed €171 million to more than 600 organisations in 60 countries in 2025, on a budget of almost €258 million, with much of its funding coming from donors such as the Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the IKEA and Robert Bosch foundations.
That money went out as 959 grants to 631 recipients, 206 of them funded for the first time. The ECF says public money accounts for less than 1 per cent of its income.
ECF has also been a recipient of German public money. The environment ministry provided the ECF with around half a million euro in grant funding in 2025 and €1.13 million in 2024, Welt reported.
The foundation’s own entry in the Bundestag lobby register puts the 2025 figure higher, at between €660,001 and €670,000, booked under the heading “International Climate Protection”.
Germany’s federal government is due to spend some €268 million of taxpayers’ money on environmental and climate projects run by NGOs between 2020 and 2027.
The speed of the move has drawn criticism across the German press.
Left-wing outlet Der Spiegel called the switch questionable, “because of its pace — and the princely remuneration”.
The foundation did not disclose how high Flasbarth’s remuneration at the ECF will be, but his predecessor received around €663,500 in 2025 and €768,000 in 2024.
He is taking early retirement with his departure from the ministry and his new wage would be offset with his pension.
This is possible for civil servants from the age of 63. His current basic salary is around €17,000 a month.
Flasbarth could receive a pension despite further private income, which would be reduced by around 8 per cent due to early retirement.
Flasbarth will also no longer attend the COP31 UN climate conference in Antalya, southern Turkey, in an official capacity, a ministry spokeswoman confirmed. He is still taking part in preparatory talks in Fiji and Tuvalu, though November’s political bargaining will proceed without him.
Transparency NGO LobbyControl said the move was legal under current rules but nonetheless problematic.
“This is not a classic move into a company or a lobby association with business interests, but it is still not unproblematic,” Christina Deckwirth of LobbyControl told der Freitag.
“Firstly, he is moving from a fairly high political office into an organisation that is also involved in lobbying work”.
Deckwirth noted that mandatory cooling-off periods currently apply only to ministers and parliamentary state secretaries, not to civil-servant state secretaries such as Flasbarth. Those periods run from 12 to 18 months.
“It is important that cooling-off periods should also apply to civil-servant state secretaries and that the existing rules are strengthened,” she said.
“In any case, the ministry must ensure that the European Climate Foundation does not gain privileged access to politics through this move, for example that through Flasbarth’s contacts with his former colleagues, more public money now flows into the foundation,” Deckwirth said.
She added that it remained unclear whether the ministry’s review and approval of the move had yet been completed. LobbyControl said it had no evidence that the grants had served as a job application.
Kate Hampton, chair of the ECF’s supervisory board and chief executive of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, one of the foundation’s donors, said the new chief executive “shares ECF’s commitment to civil society, our sense of urgency and a people-centred understanding of the climate transition”.
Jennifer Tollmann of the NGO Germanwatch said the appointment would give the foundation “an enormously experienced strategist” at a difficult time for civil society work.
Flasbarth is one of Germany’s most experienced climate and environment officials, described by German media as the “shadow environment minister” and the “captain of German climate diplomacy”.
He led the nature conservation organisation Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) from 1992 to 2003, served as president of the Federal Environment Agency from 2009 to 2013, and was state secretary in the environment ministry from 2013 to 2021.
He then spent four years as state secretary in the development ministry, responsible in part for international climate finance, before returning to the environment ministry in May 2025. He applied twice, in 2016 and 2018, to lead the UN Environment Programme without success.
As state secretary he regularly represented Germany at the EU Environment Council and its preparatory bodies, where member states fix their position on Green Deal legislation.
Secret contracts between the European Commission and “green” NGOs were reportedly part of an alleged “shadow lobbying scheme”, according to a Dutch newspaper. https://t.co/cAWxagk9TA
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) January 23, 2025
