Conference on the Heat Transition on 8 December in Berlin: Focus on Political and Social Science Perspectives

On December 8, 2025, DIW Berlin co-hosted the conference on the heat transition organized by the accompanying research BEWEGT on the EUREF campus. The conference brought together numerous contributions from political and social sciences and clearly showed how diverse social science research on the heating transition has become.

The focus was on questions that are crucial for the success of the heating transition:

• How can citizens be better involved in transformation processes?
• How can the increasingly polarized social discourse around alternative heating technologies be shaped constructively?
• How can aspects of social justice be systematically taken into account in the heating transition?
• And how can municipal heat planning be sensibly coordinated across cities and regions?

In three panel sessions and one poster session, researchers and practitioners discussed these questions intensively. From DIW Berlin, Franziska Holz, Dana Kirchem, and Caroline Stiel, among others, contributed their expertise to the discussions and provided impetus for combining economic, social science, and energy policy perspectives.

A highlight of the conference was the panel discussion moderated by Florian Kern (IÖW), in which Charlotta Maiworm (BMWE), Johannes Hofmann (GermanZero), Elisa Dunkelberg (Senate Berlin) and Sibylle Braungardt (Oeko-Institut) shed light on key challenges of the heating transition from a political science and practice-oriented perspective and answered questions from the audience.

The conference made it clear:

There is a great need for exchange on social science research on the heating transition – and this research can feed back important findings in policy advice and practice.

The conference was made possible by the joint commitment of a broad-based organisational team from the Oeko-Institut, the RIFS Research Institute for Sustainability at the GFZ, the German Political Science Association (DVPW), the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), Fraunhofer ISI and DIW Berlin. We would like to thank all participants and contributors for their constructive cooperation.

Special thanks also go to the on-site team of Fraunhofer ENIQ for their support in the organization, technology and framework conditions of the conference. The conference was funded by Project Management Jülich (PtJ) and the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

The Heat Transition Conference opened up an important exchange space for multidisciplinary perspectives on the heat transition – a space that DIW Berlin will continue to develop with the newly launched research project "Wärme-ZIEL".