system, the burning embers, and the budget approach for emissions. Honors In 2002, Schellnhuber received the Royal Society's Wolfson Research Merit Award In 2004 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II appointed him to Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences (US) appointed him as a member. He was awarded the German Environment Prize in 2007. In that same year, he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2011, he was the first German to receive the Volvo Environment Prize, which is the highest-ranking award in the field of environmental sciences worldwide. He was honoured with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (first class) as well and holds honorary doctorates from Copenhagen University and Technical University of Berlin. The German magazine Cicero in 2012 ranked him amongst the 500 most important German intellectuals. In 2017, Schellnhuber was awarded the Blue Planet Prize of the Asahi Glass Foundation. Civic involvement and service As one of the leading climate scientists worldwide, he has been a consultant to the former President of the European Union Commission, José Manuel Barroso. In 2007, he was appointed Chief Government Advisor on Climate and Related Issues during Germany's EU Council Presidency and G8 Presidency. In 2007, Schellnhuber started "A Nobel Cause – Nobel Laureate Symposium Series on Global Sustainability" in Potsdam, bringing together Nobel Laureates from all disciplines with leading sustainability scientists. In 2009, this event took place in London and in 2011 in Stockholm, where the UN general secretary's High Level Panel on Sustainability came to the meeting to receive a memorandum that was fed into the Rio+20 conference in 2012. Schellnhuber offers scientific insights to business leaders, as a member of the Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank and chair of the governing board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology's Climate Knowledge and Innovation Communities (EIT Climate KIC). In 2012, he was the lead-author of a report commissioned by the World Bank on possible impacts of a 4 degrees Celsius warming towards the end of the 21st century. This report received a lot of attention worldwide. That same year, Schellnhuber presented the keynote at the gala dinner that opened the high-level segment of the world climate summit COP18 in Doha, Qatar. In the presence of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon and UNFCCC's boss Christiana Figueres, a