Publications | Umweltbundesamt

Transport

A road toll for Germany: Every kilometre counts

The contribution of an HGV, coach and car toll to the environment-oriented financing of transport infrastructure

A distance-based toll for HGV, coaches and cars makes it possible to set differentiated charges for infrastructure and other costs incurred by society as a result of road traffic – for instance, environmental costs. Frequent drivers pay more than occasional drivers, resulting in positive ecological and traffic steering effects and which is why the use of this instrument in Germany should be expand...read more

Climate | Energy

Evaluation and development of recommendations on the CDM EB’s Sustainable Development tool including the sustainability requirements of other flexible mechanisms

The research project seeks to identify the CDM SD tool's possible shortcomings, and to make structured recommendations on how to improve the EB's SD tool. Findings from this project are meant to have a lighthouse effect on the development of provisions on Sustainable Development within other carbon mechanisms of the UNFCCC and beyond. This report represents the consolidated findings of three work...read more

Water

Status of nutrient bookkeeping in the Baltic Sea countries

The Baltic Sea is under considerable ecological pressure from nutrient input originating from land-based diffuse sources and nutrient losses caused by agricultural land use. Significance of the latter source is increasing especially as within the framework of HELCOM, all Contracting Parties have made considerable efforts to build and extend municipal wastewater treatment plants and have declared i...read more

Climate | Energy, Air

Emission Balance of Renewable Energy Sources in 2014 (Flyer)

An Analysis undertaken by the German Environment Agency

Calculations for the year 2014 show that the expansion of renewable energies contributes substantially to achieving national climate goals in Germany. Over all energy sectors (i.e. electricity, heat and transport) fossil fuels are increasingly replaced by renewable energies thereby permanently avoiding energy related emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) and air pollutants. In 2014, GHG-emissions am...read more

Sustainability | Strategies | International matters

Integrated Scenarios in the scope of the national sustainability strategy

Possible context scenarios for sustainability policy up to 2040 and sustainable design options for spare time, habitation and nutrition

Sustainability, by definition, is about maintaining future capability in one‘s own decisions. What happens, though, if the framework conditions change? What if the different political, economic and social actors have different ideas of sustainable solutions? Systematically developed future scenarios have been used to point out room for solution for sustainable action in spare time, living and buil...read more

Chemicals, Water

Comparison of species sensitivity of Daphnia and fish in acute and chronic testing

Based on the animal welfare concept (Art. 13, Art. 25), the REACh Regulation (EC 1907/2006) provides several options to avoid the long term fish toxicity test. About 240 substances from the ECHA and ICS database including 73 pesticides are analysed for species sensitivity differences and acute to chronic ratios to evaluate whether and when chronic fish toxicity tests can be avoided without underes...read more

Waste | Resources, Soil | Land

Resource-Efficient Land Use – Towards a Global Sustainable Land Use Standard (GLOBALANDS)

Given the challenges of future land use policies addressing sustainable natural resources manage-ment and socioeconomic aspects, the inter- and transdisciplinary GLOBALANDS (Global Land Use and Sustainability) project identified relevant international policy options, their synergies and possi-ble implementation, and initiated and supported respective processes. GLOBALANDS identified also “windows...read more

The UBA

Data on the Environment 2015

Environmental Trends in Germany

Environmental policy requires great staying power not only in terms of climate protection. A look at air pollution control and water protection shows that while harmful emissions to the environment are decreasing in many areas, this is no reason to sound the all clear. For example, only ten percent of rivers and streams in Germany and only about one percent of examined sections of North and Baltic...read more