Content | Umweltbundesamt

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 Ba... read more

Staying within the limit of the Paris Agreement of 1.5 °C global warming requires closing the global 2030 ambition and action gap arising from insufficient current policies and contributions. G20 countries have a crucial role to play in realising increased climate policy ambition, given their strong economic and political influence as well as their high share in global greenhouse gas emissions... read more

This discussion paper presents the German Environment Agency's (UBA) initial considerations for a sustainable recovery program for Ukraine. The following principles should apply to the design of a recovery program: Integration of environmental, sustainability and economic policies; resilience; sufficiency; socially just design of reconstruction; ownership; learning orientation; solidarity; use... read more

At the RESCUE conference (“Resource-Efficient Pathways towards Greenhouse Gas Neutrality”), the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA) shared the results of a project to further explore the mutual dependencies and feedback loops between climate policies and associated resource requirements. Six different quantitative scenarios for Germany were modelled and analysed. These scenarios d... read more

Today more than 45 % of all energy-related CO2 emissions come from burning coal. Thus, reducing CO2 emissions from coal use is a necessity for reaching the targets of the Paris Agreement. This will not only pose challenges for coal consumers (restructuring of the energy system), but also for countries whose economy is strongly depending on the production of coal.This paper examines the role of... read more

The paper analyses 130 studies on green recovery programmes. It finds broad consensus on the need to use the Covid-19 recovery efforts to also address the climate and biodiversity crises. Consensus also exist on the benefits of green recovery programmes, the eligibility criteria to be applied and suitable areas of support. Further, research is increasingly calling for linking green recovery pr... read more

The study shows that it is possible to transform Germany to both greenhouse gas neutral and resource efficient. One side of the balance is greenhouse gas and raw material saving due to exit from fossil energy carriers and the other is the increased raw material use for the construction of the renewable energy system. In the “GreenEe” scenario it is possible to reduce the GHG emissions in 2050 ... read more