Since April 2022, Dr. Imme Scholz serves as Co-President of the Berlin-based Heinrich Böll Foundation. Prior to that she had been Deputy Director of the German Development Institute (Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik, DIE) since 2009. She is an Honorary professor for Global Sustainability and its Normative Fundamentals at the Center for Ethics and Responsibility (ZEV) at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences in St. Augustin.

Imme Scholz is Deputy Chair of the Council for Sustainable Development (RNE), where she has been active since 2013. In addition, she is the Co-Chair of the Independent Group of Scientists, an organisation that has been commissioned by the United Nations to prepare the second Global Sustainable Development Report. She is also a member of the "Bioökonomierrat" (Council on Ecological Economics) and of the supervisory board of Diakonie, the social welfare organisation of Germany’s Protestant churches (since 2012) and the German Committee on Sustainability Research. Between 2003 and 2022 she served on the Böll Foundation‛s North-South expert advisory board.

Imme Scholz joined the German Development Institute in 1992 as a research assistant, and between 2002 and 2009 she was in charge of its newly created division for "Environmental Policy and the Management of Natural Resources", where she established a programme on "climate change adaptation in developing countries". Her research focus has been on numerous aspects of climate change, the natural environment and development.

In the 1980s she studied sociology at Berlin‛s Free University, earning her PhD in 1999 with a thesis titled Environmental standards for the export of tropical timber - the adaptability of timber-exporting companies in Eastern Amazonia, Brazil.