Rebecca Harms, born in 1956 in Hambrock near Uelzen in Lower Saxony, trained as a tree nursery and landscape gardener after graduating from a grammar school in Uelzen. From 1984 to 1988 she worked as an assistant to Undine von Plottnitz in the Rainbow Group (GRAEL) of the European Parliament. She then worked as a filmmaker in the Wendländische Filmcooperative until her election to the Lower Saxony parliament in 1994, making several documentaries for WDR, ZDF and arte, among others.

Already active in the free youth movement since 1971, Rebecca Harms worked in the SPAK working group in the areas of work with the homeless and youth centres. At the end of the seventies, she was a founding member of the Citizens' Initiative for Environmental Protection Lüchow-Dannenberg and remained on the board of the citizens' initiative in various functions until the beginning of the nineties.

Rebecca Harms, Chairwoman of the Alliance 90/The Greens parliamentary group in Lower Saxony from 1998-2004, is, in addition to her membership in the Green Academy, also a member of the Alliance 90/The Greens party council, the advisory board of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Wasserkraftwerke Niedersachsen und Schleswig-Holstein e.V. and a member of the NDR broadcasting council. She has been a member of the European Parliament since 2004, where she was spokesperson for the German group of Alliance 90/The Greens. In the European Parliament, she is a member of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy and a substitute member of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety.

As group chair, she deals thematically with all important issues of European policy, currently specifically with the euro crisis, the Ukraine crisis and the free trade agreement between the USA and the EU (TTIP). Her heartfelt issues are energy and nuclear policy, foreign policy and climate protection.

Rebecca Harms is a member of the Conference of Presidents and the EU-Ukraine Delegation and a substitute member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET), the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) and the EU-Russia Delegation.