Publications

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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

Printing technology is classified into four main printing methods and a range of less usual methods. Many of these less customary processes do not play an important role in today’s industrial production because of their low material flow and energy flux. In the following illustration the relevant processes for the BAT discussion are marked grey.

The REM/CALGRID model's available advection schemes have numerical diffusivities that are sufficiently low that one must be concerned about: (a) adding back some horizontal diffusion appropriate to the atmospheric conditions being modeled; and (b) operator-splitting and shear flow errors, heretofore buried by the numerical diffusion.

Based on a first estimate of Black Carbon (BC) emissions over Europe model calculations have been performed to obain BC-concentrations. The model results have a clear tendency to be lower than the observations.

The European Commission has elaborated the principles of a new chemicals policy in Europe in its White Paper on “Strategy for a future Chemicals Policy” (European Commission, 2001). Studies have since been published for Germany and for the EU which look into the potential economic repercussions of future policies on chemicals.