Publications

European legislation on exhaust emissions has made major progress with the adaption of limit value standards up to and including Euro 4 for passenger cars on light-duty commercial vehicles and Euro V for heavy-duty engines. Exhaust gas limit values need to be updated primarily for vehicle with diesel engines.

The objective of the project was to contribute to the implementation of Directive 96/61/EC on Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC).

While it is generally acknowledged that air transport causes environmental damages that are not included in its price - so-called external environmental costs - it is sometimes argued that air transport covers at least its infrastructure costs. This argument is important in the discussion on distortions of competition between transport modes.

This report aims at quantifying, within ranges as small as possible, external costs from environmental impacts of aviation. Benefits of aviation are important too, but they are generally, in contrast to the negative impacts, well captured by the market.

Germany has committed itself in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – as have other Member States of the European Union – to prepare inventories of its annual greenhouse gas emissions by source categories. The EU is itself a signatory to the Convention.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCCC) was ratified by Germany in December 1983 and entered into force in March 1994. As a Party to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, Germany is obliged to prepare, publish and regularly update national emission inventories of greenhouse gases.

This report describes the implementation and the application of Kalman Filter rountines around the model REM3/CALGRID employed at the Free University of Berlin (FUB) in the framework of the FUB-project 'Entwicklung eines Modellsystems für das Zusammenspiel von Messung und Rechnung für die bundeseinheitliche Umsetzung der EU-Rahmenrichtlinie Luftqualität'.

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the current GATS negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO) require special attention from an environmental policy perspective. The GATS - which is both a trade and an investment agreement – may have potentially far reaching implications, amongst others for domestic policy choices relating to social and environmental objectives.

Since the interior atmosphere represents a major part of the built environment, determining emissions from those sources which influence indoor air quality is of great importance. Recently, interest has been focussed on flame retardants (FR) which have been increasingly used in consumer and building products in combination with a rapid increase in the use of plastics.

For preparing this report, the concerned available knowledge in Germany in this field has been collected and documented as far as possible.

It can be expected that the benthic communities and the demersal fish fauna will be affected both in the short and medium-term by the construction of wind energy plants, particularly by the dislodging of sediment. To what extent and areal scale, the construction noise will affect the benthos and fish fauna can currently not be answered. 

Chemical substances usually serve a specific technical purpose in a product or production process. At the same time, the technical qualities of a substance may be connected with risks to the environment and human health. A particular risk results from the release of long-lived (persistent) and harmful chemicals, which may accumulate in the long run in living organisms or water eco-systems.