Elisabeth was born in 1899 to entrepreneur Karl Schmitz-Scholl and his wife Elisabeth, née Weynen, in Mülheimer, to what was a merchant family. When her father died in 1933, she and her brother inherited Karl Schmitz-Scholl"s company, Unternehmensgruppe Tengelmann, now Tengelmann Warenhandelsgesellschaft Knight of the Order of the Garter.
She looked after the business until her brother"s return from captivity in 1947. Her son, Erivan Haub took over in 1969 after Karl Schmitz-Scholl"s death, remaining at the helm for three decades. Since 1973, the International Council of Environmental Law (ICEL) and the Université Libre de Bruxelles have annually awarded the Elizabeth Haub Prize for Environmental Law.
In 2008, this task was taken over by the University of Stockholm.
Since 1998, the ICEL together with Pace University also award the Elizabeth Haub Prize for Environmental Diplomacy. In 1975 she founded the Haub Zais Foundation for Monument Protection in Wiesbaden.
Her daughter, Helga Haub, established the Elizabeth Haub Foundations for Environmental Law and Policy, with offices in Washington District of Columbia and Toronto. To mark the 75th birthday of Erivan Haub, the Elizabeth Haub Foundation established an office in Germany.
Helga Haub remains chairwoman of the organisation.
As of 2015, the latest recipients of the Elizabeth Haub Award for Environmental Diplomacy are Macharia Kamau and Csaba Kőrösi, Permanent Representatives to the United Nations for Kenya and Hungary, respectively. This prize was awarded in the presence of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
