Science, Sustainability, Business, Politics, and a hint of chocolate.
By: Kathryn Hamilton
Tags: Biotechnology, Careers, Sustainability, Science, Public Affairs

CAREERS

Science, Sustainability, Business, Politics, and a hint of chocolate.

A special highlight speaking with Matthias Berninger, Head of Public Affairs, Science, and Sustainability at Bayer.

Translating my love of science and business into a meaningful career does not have an intuitive roadmap. So to build one, I focused on finding business mavericks to learn about how they built careers of impact. A special highlight of this experience has been speaking with Matthias Berninger, Head of Public Affairs, Science, and Sustainability at Bayer.

Matthias has certainly crafted a bold, unconventional, and innovative career. After receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Kassel, he was elected four times to the German Parliament as a member of the Green Party. After leaving politics, he moved to Mars working in several positions including the Global Chocolate Management Team to challenge the corporate strategy status quo in sustainability and communication. Since joining Bayer in 2019, he has led the development of the company’s global sustainability strategy. Under his leadership, Bayer is working to reduce its operational emissions by 42% in 2030. I hope his thought-provoking journey and compelling worldview challenges you to think boldly about the future we are creating.

I hope his thought-provoking journey and compelling worldview challenges you to think boldly about the future we are creating.

During undergrad, you studied political science and government, chemistry, and education - why did you decide to study something science-related and where did your love of science come from?

So, for me, love of science is something I developed in middle school, especially for chemistry. Then in the 80’s, awareness about global sustainability challenges was just starting. The Montreal Protocol in 1986 and the first global climate conference in Rio de Janeiro those were the two, if you will, bookends of my interest. It was marked by this understanding that environmental issues turn from local and regional to global issues. And I thought to really understand them, a good dose of science would help.

You were planning on becoming a teacher, and you were elected as the youngest MP ever in Germany. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to go that route instead of becoming a teacher?

The German Greens campaigned in 1989 about climate change when everybody in Germany was talking about reunification. They were in a way ahead in understanding the global nature of the environmental crisis and helplessly behind in understanding the desire of Germans to reunify. The Greens lost the election and didn’t send any members of Parliament from the former Western part of Germany in the first reunified Parliament. Subsequently, when I ran four years later, there were no incumbents. That made it easier for a new generation, including me, to get organized and win in the primaries, kind of similar to what AOC experienced when she ran two years ago.

As a part of your time in government, how did your science education play a role in your work? How did you promote science in everything you were doing?

Photo by Jack Sloop on Unsplash

It was essential when I had to deal with the mad cow disease outbreak. Fast forward from 1994 to 2000, I entered the government when mad cow disease hit continental Europe. There was, with hindsight, an unsubstantiated belief that European cows could not get as mad as the British cows. I was suddenly catapulted in a small group of people that had to manage what, we thought back then, was a big crisis but pales in comparison to the current pandemic. In the day, the willingness to change on the basis of new science was underdeveloped. It was not standard practice to distinguish between risk assessment on the one side and approval of processes on the other side, so a lot went wrong. The split between risk assessment and product approvals was one of the enduring positive results in Europe after coping with mad cow disease. If you look now at where we are now in Europe, you have around 80 million cows that have been tested for mad cow disease in the last year — with almost no cases anymore. It’s proof that the systematic approach of removing the sources for mad cow disease from the food chain has been successful. In this case, risk materials that ended up in the food chain for cows that don’t eat meat were identified and removed, meaning these sources of cannibalism in the food chain disappeared.

In that situation, the stakes are high, how did you find it with a science background, your ability to understand and communicate ideas to people who didn’t have a science background?

I hardly consider myself a scientist because I did not spend that much time in education. To make up for this, I listen to a lot of scientists and academics. I was able to translate the scientific method and the resulting insights into the world of political decision making. Generally speaking, without a mechanism of translation, when politics meets science, politics wins. We can see that playing out to our detriment at the moment when looking at the pandemic response. We need to strengthen the belief in science to be able to mobilize political support behind some admittingly very tough decisions.

But at the same time, there are many challenges that you cannot explain with just scientific reasoning. I will give you an example, I had to manage a crisis where there was a minor amount of a chemical in a product. You would have to eat around 9,000 eggs a month in order for this chemical to reach a level that would negatively impact your health. Obviously, no one would do that. But it didn’t matter because when people are scared, they lose their ability to assess risk. They focus on the hazard and of course people play with that by feeding off this inability to dimensionalize a hazard. If we look at all hazards through the same lens, we aren’t able to prioritize risks. We then have risk management ADD because everything looks equally dangerous which is not the case. We need to have the ability to balance hazards with probabilities and really understand what the true risk is.