Josef Settele

Josef Settele was born on 23 May 1961 in Marktoberdorf, in the Allgäu region of Bavaria. He studied agricultural biology at the University of Hohenheim from 1982 to 1988, carrying out research in the Philippines in 1985. His diploma thesis and his 1992 doctorate, both at Hohenheim, examined how the intensification of wet rice farming changed the communities of insects and other arthropods living on the rice terraces of Ifugao province in northern Luzon.

After working at Hohenheim's Institute for Agricultural Ecology in the Tropics and Subtropics from 1989 to 1992, Settele joined the newly founded Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in 1993. He completed his habilitation on metapopulations of farmland butterflies in the mid 1990s, taught landscape and agricultural ecology at Hohenheim, and from 2002 taught ecology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, which made him an adjunct professor in 2016. He later headed the UFZ Department of Conservation Biology and held honorary or adjunct posts at the University of the Philippines and Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

In 2002 he led his first large EU project, MACMAN, on Maculinea butterflies as indicators for habitat conservation, bringing together researchers from almost 20 countries. He then coordinated ALARM (2004 to 2009), the largest EU project on terrestrial biodiversity to that date, with 67 partners in 35 countries studying risks from climate change, pollinator loss, pollutants and invasive species; it produced more than 1,000 scientific papers. Later projects included LEGATO (2011 to 2016) on traditional landscapes in Southeast Asia and STACCATO (2015 to 2020) on sustainable agriculture.

From 2010 to 2014 he was a coordinating lead author for the chapter on terrestrial and inland water systems in the fifth assessment report of the IPCC. At IPBES he was a coordinating lead author of the pollinator assessment (2014 to 2016), a lead author of the Asia-Pacific regional assessment, one of the three co-chairs of the Global Assessment (2016 to 2019) and, from 2022, an elected member of the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel. In Germany he sat on the German Advisory Council on the Environment from 2020, the Leopoldina focus group on biodiversity, land use and climate from 2022, and the scientific advisory board on natural climate protection from 2024. He was named a Highly Cited Researcher every year from 2014.

He co-founded the Tagfalter-Monitoring Deutschland citizen science scheme in 2005 and wrote widely for general readers, including Die Tagfalter Deutschlands, Die Triple-Krise (2020) and Keine Zeit für Pessimismus (2025, with Dirk Rossmann).

Settele was known to almost everyone in his field simply as Sepp. Colleagues at the UFZ described him as open, friendly and approachable, a man who never lost his down-to-earth manner despite his scientific success and who preferred to discuss projects and plans in person, often over a coffee or a cigarette. He was survived by his family.

Josef Settele died suddenly and unexpectedly on 9 October 2026, aged 65. The cause of death was not made public. The UFZ announced his death in an obituary on 12 October 2026 signed by its scientific director Katrin Böhning-Gaese, administrative director Sabine Matthiä and Ingolf Kühn, and opened an online book of condolence. The same day the IPBES secretariat published a tribute, and the news was carried by the German news agency dpa, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and MDR.

Settele helped put biodiversity loss on the same political footing as climate change. The IPBES Global Assessment he co-chaired became one of the most cited environmental reports of its time, and his work on pollinators informed policy in Europe and beyond. The butterfly monitoring scheme he co-founded continues to rely on volunteers across Germany, and the UFZ said his legacy was a call to keep working for the things he had championed so tirelessly.