It is quite telling that when Brigitte Knopf, Secretary-General at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), is asked what her favorite pub was during her studies in Marburg, she first thinks of the small book café down by the little Lahn river – and not of a tavern. Knopf, born in Bonn in 1973, 1.0 A-levels, diploma and thesis with distinction, became fascinated with physics, mathematics and the environment at an early age.