Christina Wulf (FZJ)

Christina Wulf heads the Sustainable Life Cycles team at Forschungszentrum Jülich. Her work focuses on the life cycle sustainability assessment of hydrogen and power-to-X technologies. Christina Wulf completed her PhD at Hamburg University of Technology and joined Forschungszentrum Jülich as a postdoc in 2015. She is head of her own research team since 2023. We spoke to her in an interview about her work and what drives her.

Interview:

What are you currently working on?

Christina Wulf: My team and I are working on the further development of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) methods. We evaluate new technologies in terms of their environmental impact, costs and social effects over their entire life cycle. We focus primarily on new technologies in the energy sector. An important topic here is the extrapolation of the technology and the assessment into the future. I am currently working on the question of how the results of the individual analyses can be meaningfully combined with the methods of multi-criteria analysis. The aggregation and weighting in particular are based on value-based decisions. This must be methodically developed and implemented for the LCSA.

What is your personal motivation?

Christina Wulf: We have been aware of anthropogenic climate change for decades and the effects are slowly becoming more and more noticeable for humanity. This was the motivation for me to get involved with renewable energies during my studies. In addition to climate change, however, there are other environmental impacts of technologies with more local effects that must not be lost sight of. In addition, energy must remain affordable and the energy transition in Germany must not lead to the exploitation of people in other parts of the world. This conflicting area of sustainability should not be forgotten when developing new technologies and my work in the field of LCSA helps to point out and minimize potential problems as early as the technology development stage.

What kind of challenges are you facing in the near future?

Christina Wulf: Acquiring third-party funding has become increasingly difficult in recent years. Competition for EU applications is becoming increasingly fierce, and the previous federal government has made less money available for projects for reasons of austerity. We must therefore become even more creative in the future in order to continue to carry out projects with interesting partners.

If you could make a wish for something for your research, what would you wish for?

Christina Wulf: Often, only greenhouse gas emissions and costs are discussed when evaluating technologies. Other sustainability impacts are rarely considered, e.g. when we propose this in the project concept. In the future, it should become a matter of course that all sustainability dimensions are analyzed when evaluating technologies.

Where do you see your discipline in 5-10 years?

Christina Wulf: A lot has happened in the field of life cycle assessment in recent years in the context of the forward-looking evaluation of technologies. This goes hand in hand with the development of new open source tools. These developments will be further expanded and the additional use of artificial intelligence will enable faster and more complex analyses. This will also have an impact on the LCSA, as analyses can be better linked and more data will be freely accessible.

ORCID: 0000-0003-2698-0089