Dr. Dietrich Bartelt (born in 1964) and has been co-founder, direct and/or intermediate share or stake holder of a number of national, regional and global active companies including companies like Licht Holding SE, DB Holistic Consulting, Sediments GmbH, Ferrostaal DB Sediments GmbH and others.
He studied Civil Engineering and Business Administration at the Aachen University of Technology (RWTH Aachen), Germany. He specialized in hydraulic engineering, water resources management, soil mechanics and environmental management.
Areas of interest and activities of Dr. Bartelt range from water, environment, sustainable energy and electricity regeneration, and sustainable agriculture and food production to human and animal health. Starting with the development of green electricity tariffs and promoting these internationally, as being one of the inventors of ideas for global green house gas emission trading to achieve the targets of the 1990 Kyoto Protocol, he has been focusing on effective ways to reduce emissions from all sectors.
For 21 years, Dr. Bartelt had been working for the German utility company RWE, holding various technical and management positions, including project leadership of large international renewable energy project studies. As Senior Manager, he had been Global Coordinator of Occupational Safety of the RWE Group for more than 1,000 companies and more than 130,000 employees, and had been responsible for the coordination of environmental issues for several hundred companies within the RWE Group. While working on topics on the human resources strategy within the department of the Chief Human Resources Officer of the RWE Group, Dr. Bartelt obtained his PhD at the University of Duisburg-Essen in the field of Economic Psychology. In 2006, he was a founding member of the German Demographic Network. In 2012, he published his doctoral thesis titled, “Trust of Employees in their Management.”
In the field of renewable power generation, he has been active in setting up multinational projects, project management structures, site development, authorization procedures, plant operations, and joint implementation projects with a focus on hydropower, wind power, and solar energy. For a number of years, he had been elected Secretary of the European utility organization, EURE (European Utilities for Renewable Energies).
After leaving the global utility business in March 2013, he has been focusing his life on the sustainable storage of water and its importance within the Water-Energy-Food Nexus. He has been giving special attention to water in the anthropocene, the epoch that begins when human activities start to have a significant global impact on Earth's ecosystems.
Keeping the people and (eco-) system(s) in balance is his great challenge. No challenge is too big and too global not to be addressed! His personal aim is to reach sustainability in using water as drinking water, for irrigation and flood protection, and for hydropower generation. He has been developing a sensitive system approach to mitigate the impact of using water resources while simultaneously providing a solution for sedimentation and siltation issues in reservoirs, producing renewable energy and improving flood mitigation at the same time.
Being active as a member of the advisory board of the Global Institute for Water, Environment and Health, his special attention is the water footprint and water quality. His focus has been widened to agriculture and the pharmaceutical industry and on sustainable problem solutions. These play an important role in a topic with growing global importance of antimicrobial resistance – the biggest threat to life on earth with bacteria, germs and fungi having an strong impact on the effective and sustainable use of water, but also on the (in-) direct contribution to climate change.
Most recently, Dr. Bartelt has been engaged in private equity, venture capital and financing activities for national and international projects with outstanding sustainable (bio-) technologies, including innovative solutions for waste to energy approaches.