Andreas Wolter

Mayor of the City of Cologne, Germany | Board member since 2018

Andreas Wolter has been directly elected to the Cologne City Council four times (2004, 2009, 2014 and 2020). Since his election by the city council in 2014, he has served as both a voluntary mayor and the deputy mayor of Cologne. The City of Cologne has been a member of Climate Alliance since 1993.

Wolter is particularly active in tackling climate change via solutions in the areas of energy production, agriculture and transport. As a member of the Supervisory Board of the local transport company (KVB), he is committed to climate protection and a transport transition towards more rail, bus, bicycle and foot traffic.

He is also strongly committed to climate justice: To protect the Amazon rainforests and indigenous lands, he has called for a reduction in the consumption of fossil fuels and a change in our mobility behaviour. He travelled to Ecuador and Peru in 2017 where he was confronted with the negative consequences of oil production and palm oil cultivation for so-called biofuels firsthand. These visits resulted in an official climate partnership between the city of Cologne and the Peruvian community of Yarinacocha.

Andreas Wolter believes in Climate Alliance's work on illustrating these global connections and motivating municipalities and regions to do more than our national governments dictate. With the citizens, he also calls for greater commitment to climate protection, a healthy urban climate, environmentally compatible mobility and fair trade.

Andreas Wolter was born in 1964 in Schleiden in the Eifel region of northwestern Germany. He lives in Cologne and has two daughters with his partner. When he is not acting as a mayor, he works as a business economist in the accounting department of a service company.

_{Photo: Climate Alliance}