In an increasingly digitalised world, public access to reliable and up-to-date data is of crucial importance and a major concern of environmental policy. Environmental information is an important basis for sustainable development. The umwelt.info portal offers laypeople and experts direct access to relevant information on environmental protection and nature conservation.
Federal Minister for the Environment Steffi Lemke: “The new ‘umwelt.info’ portal makes environmental and nature conservation data easily accessible and clear for all citizens as well as science, administration and companies. This is real progress for a policy oriented towards the common good. After all, if high-quality data is easily available, this can, for example, improve corporate planning, speed up authorisation procedures and make environmental protection more effective. Scientific analyses become more comprehensive and precise.”
UBA President Dirk Messner: “The National Centre for Environmental and Nature Conservation Information at the German Environment Agency is a pioneering project in the field of digitalisation and transparency of administration. With the help of the umwelt.info portal, we enable structured and efficient access to a variety of publicly available environmental and nature conservation data throughout Germany.”
The umwelt.info portal offers a wide range of functions: The centrepiece is a search engine that searches recorded data sources with their metadata and enables it to be found centrally. In future, all publicly available information and data from the field of environmental protection and nature conservation in Germany will be searchable via this engine. The original source of this data will be made transparent and there will be information on how the available environmental information may be used. This creates user-friendly access to existing information. The umwelt.info portal thus opens up a wide range of possibilities for the further utilisation of important environmental and nature conservation information in various fields of application. Editorial content and a target group-specific presentation of the content support the broad focus of the portal.
umwelt.info is one of 18 flagship projects of the German government's digital strategy. The data portal enables the human- and machine-readable reutilisation of data from the entire German environmental and nature conservation information landscape. Future development will also focus on users and their needs and requirements. In addition, incentives will be created for data providers to make their data available in an open and reusable form. The portal was developed in-house by the UBA and all of the team's technical developments are freely accessible on the Open CoDE platform, which strengthens digital sovereignty in public administration.
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