Publications

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.

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.

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.

International negotiations have lead to first steps in combating climate change with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol. Under the Protocol, industrialized countries have to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by around five per cent between 2008 and 2012 compared to 1990 levels.