Division I

Martin Schmied in the Umweltbundesamt Dessau-Roßlau office buildingClick to enlarge
Martin Schmied is the head of Division I
Source: Susanne Kambor / Umweltbundesamt

Division I’s sphere of responsibility encompasses sustainable development strategies, traffic and noise pollution. In this regard, sustainable-development strategies aimed at substantially reducing the carbon footprint of energy and raw material use are taking on ever growing importance.

Environmental Planning and Sustainability Strategies

Environmentally sustainable transport

Vehicular traffic is one of the most serious environmental problems facing us today. For many people, a car is not just a means of transportation, but is also an expression of their individual lifestyle. It is against this backdrop that Division I, apart from its work on technologies aimed at reducing motor vehicle related environmental degradation, also investigates psychological strategies aimed at encouraging Germans to switch to environmentally sustainable means of transportation. The goal here is for all motorized transportation modalities to be quieter, use fewer raw materials and generate less waste and lower emissions so as to improve air quality by reducing pollution. This applies not to only to road traffic, but also to commercial air travel, shipping and mobile machines and devices.

Environmental law, business, and society

If we are to reach our environmental protection goals, we need to have more appropriate instruments at our disposal. To this end, Division I elaborates instruments from a legal, economic and social science standpoint that target the following areas: climate protection; air quality improvement; land use reduction; resource conservation. The consolidation and simplification of environmental law through an Environmental Code or other regulatory approaches also continues to figure on the agenda.

Division I also works on the legal and methodological aspects of a topic area we call “environmental impact assessement of environmentally relevant plans and projects.” This also includes evaluating and approving all activities in the Antarctic whose jumping off point is Germany.

Environmental data

If you want to protect the environment, you’ve got to have reliable data. Division I collects such data from all around Germany and compiles it into highly informative statistics and graphics, which are then posted on our Environmental Data page or provided as map services. An additional main focus of Division I comprises various databases (available in German only), the main ones being the data cataloque and the environmental research database Umweltforschungsdatenbank (UFORDAT). The National Centre for Environmental and Nature Conservation Information with its web platform „umwelt.info“, both of which are currently being established, are tasked with improving the findability of data and information published online across all of Germany.

International cooperation

International cooperation in the field of environmental protection has taken on ever growing importance over the past two decades. The main cooperation partners in this regard are European Union and United Nations organisms, the OECD, and Central and Eastern European states. The UBA also acts as the German Focal Point for the European Environmental Agency (EEA).

In the wake of the expansion of the European Union (EU), the UBA assists new member states and accession candidates from Central and Eastern Europe via initiatives such as the twinning tool, with the goal of helping such states to implement EU environmental policies. Partnerships are formed with thesese states, whereby expert officials are sent there to help them to implement Community law.

The Advisory Assistance Programme for environmental protection in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and selected Caucasus and Central Asian states aims to promote the process of implementing stringent environmental standards. The aim of German projects tailored to the situations in each of the target states is to support the Environment for Europe process and the regional environmental action programme that was adopted at the 1993 environmental ministers’ conference in Lucerne, Switzerland. The Ministry of the Environment has assigned the UBA the task of implementing the advisory assistance programme.

Environmental and spatial planning

Sparing use of environmental resources and greenfield land in particular is the main goal of environmental and spatial planning, which concerns itself with everything from sustainable regional development to urban and rural development to green construction and a programme known as Lokale Agenda 21.

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 Das UBA  Umweltbundesamt  Division I  environmental planning  sustainability strategies