About us
What do an entrepreneur, a filmmaker, and a lawyer have in common? A love for our planet and the fight to preserve our natural resources. With this premise in mind, Dorothea Sick-Thies, Carl-A. Fechner, and Markus Gohr founded Protect the Planet – Gesellschaft für ökologischen Aufbruch (Society for Ecological Change) in 2015. And since then, we have been working hard every day as a powerful environmental organization in the south of Munich.
It is our vision to prevent the climate catastrophe, and make this planet a liveable and just world.
Our mission is to encourage politicians and businesses to take appropriate climate protection measures by using legal means to achieve progress in climate policy.
To this end, we work together in strong networks so that we can pull the right levers to achieve the best results.
We also inform, inspire, encourage, and mobilize society to take action on the urgent need for climate protection. We strengthen climate education and promote acceptance for the expansion of renewable energies locally.
We focus our work on the following key areas:
Climate NETWORK for strong cooperation and shared success,
Climate LAW for legal pressure and everything that is fair for the future.
Climate EDUCATION for encouragement, inspiration, and mobilization of society,
Climate RENEWABLE for more wind behind the expansion of renewable energies, especially in Germany,
Climate LOCAL for a climate-neutral Munich and Bavaria, where we as a non-governmental organization have our home.
Our vision: “We help prevent catastrophic climate change and make our planet a just and liveable.”
We implement this vision with the help of our values:
We have been advocating for ambitious climate-change goals since 2015, and have managed to make good progress along the way, including the significant contribution we made to three successful referenda: Stop Using Hard Coal (2017), Save the Bees (2019) and the Public Petition to Preserve Green Spaces (2023).
We also initiated the first climate court case at a European level (2018), which formed the basis of the historic Federal Constitutional Court complaint (2021) to which we also contributed.
Here is an overview of our successes and milestones of the past few years:
2015 Protect the Planet set up as a non-governmental organisation by Dorothea Sick-Thies, Markus Gohr and Carl-A. Fechner.
2017 Successful participation in the referendum Stop Using Hard Coal to turn off the Munich hard-coal-fired power station by 31 December 2022.
2018 Protect the Planet gGmbH founded.
2018 First European People’s Climate Case filed with the European Court on behalf of plaintiffs from eight different countries.
2019 We were one of the co-initiators of the petition forBiodiversity and Natural Beauty “Save the Bees“, thus contributing to the most successful Bavarian referendum in history.
2020 Started the first intake of Campaigning School in conjunction with Günther Metzges-Diez, the Fundraising Academy and Germanwatch.
2020 Supported the constitutional complaint “Neubauer et al. vs the German Federal Government” against Germany’s inadequate Climate Protection Act of 2019 in cooperation with Greenpeace, Germanwatch and environmental lawyer Dr Roda Verheyen.
2021 Rejection of the People’s Climate Case just a few months after the EU Parliament raised climate targets to 60% in line with the plaintiffs’ request.
2021 Historic success of the Constitutional Complaint against the German Climate Protection Act, when climate protection was moved up the constitutional priority list and the rights of future generations strengthened by the decision of the German Constitutional Court.
2021 Launched the WindRat network for greater acceptance of wind power and much faster expansion of our wind power capacity.
2021 Corporate Climate Action: We supported the last farmer of Lützerath, Eckhart Heukamp, in his fight against appropriation of his land by the RWE coal company.
2021 Launch of our informative series of events together with our volunteer event coordinator Dr. Helmut Paschlau (until 2024).
2022 Dorothea-Laura-Janina-Sick Foundation for the Environment was founded.
2023 Successful citizen’s referendum to preserve green spaces for effective climate-adaptation measures for Munich, as one of the cities with the smallest number of cooling green spaces and the highest percentage of land sealing.
2023 Successful “Bayernwind” campaign by WindRat for greater acceptance of wind energy in the Bavarian state elections
2024 Support in filing constitutional complaint 2.0 (“Zukunftsklage” – future lawsuit) against the amendment to the Climate Protection Act that came into force on July 16, 2024, in cooperation with Germanwatch and Greenpeace.
2024 Joint project for a constitutional complaint for better biodiversity legislation in cooperation with BUND and Hannes Jarnicke
2024 Successful campaign “Bundesland Nr. 1” (Federal State No. 1) by WindRat for greater acceptance of wind energy in the state elections in Thuringia, in cooperation with the Thuringian Energy Agency (ThEGA), among others.
2025 Lawsuit filed to ban the extremely climate-damaging pesticide ProFume in cooperation with the Munich Environmental Institute as technical support for the DUH
2025 WindRat video series featuring best practice examples of successful wind projects reaches half a million people on YouTube
Our annual reports provide information about our projects, our successes, and internal matters at Protect the Planet. Click here to download:
What we do
Staying active
- Protect the Planet lobbies on a daily basis to make protection of the earth and preservation of a liveable world for current and future generations the most important social and global task of all.
- Protect the Planet advocates for peaceful and sustainable energy transformation and 100% climate-neutral lifestyle and business practices – right now!
- We network with NGOs, government, industry and civilian groups, for we can only combat climate change by working together.
- We inform and influence the formation of social, political and media opinion.
- We run our own campaigns and promote the climate change mitigation projects of our partners through education, expertise and tangible and intangible aids.
- Protect the Planet lobbies for more political resolve and responsibility for the environment and against the might of the fossil-fuel and nuclear energy industry.
- Protect the Planet is an independent, non-partisan group of people living by the values of human decency, justice, democracy and sustainability.
Current events
Seeds of Hope – Lichtblicke am Jahresende
Seeds of Hope ist ein kreativer Abend mit Impulsvorträgen, Mitmach-Aktionen und Hoffnungsmomenten. Am Montag, 08.12.2025 im oekom hub.
There is still too little known about the climate crisis and what we can do to avert it. To bridge this gap, our Climate Talks aim to provide information on many different aspects of climate change with a particular focus on specific things we can do ourselves.
Numerous experts join us in exploring the pressing questions of our time.
Missed an event? No problem, you can watch the recordings of the presentations in the archive.
Our topics:
climate LITIGATION
climate RENEWABLE
climate LOCAL
climate NETWORK
climate EDUCATION
Our vision:
to stop the
climate crisis
We help prevent the climate catastrophe and make our planet just and liveable.
