Publications

The position paper discusses the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for the global economy and geopolitics, for the countries of the Global South and for international environmental and sustainability policy. On this basis, the paper proposes approaches for a substantive reorientation of international environmental and sustainability policy.

More and more people are flying. In 2018 alone, worldwide passenger air traffic will increase by 6.7 percent compared to the previous year. And it continues to grow. This means that the negative effects are also growing. With this brochure, the German Environment Agency (UBA) is therefore addressing an important and at the same time very complex issue.

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.

The report gives an overview on synergies between the two EU-projects BRIDGE HEALTH and HBM4EU with respect to the linkage of human biomonitoring studies and health studies.

The NSAID in vitro-Bioassay – originally developed for municipal waste water samples – can now be used to detect activity of cox-inhibitors in surface waters as well. By using 44 water samples from several European countries the application range and quality of this bioassay was increased and the limit of detection is further reduced to now 12 ng diclofenac/l.

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.

Discharge water samples from Exhaust Gas Cleaning Systems (EGCS, scrubbers) were taken on board of ships and analyzed in terms of heavy metals and PAKs.

The threat to human health and vegetation by ozone is still an important topic in politics, science and the public in Germany. A workshop organized by the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS Potsdam) addressed this issue.

Since 2006, various new active pharmaceutical ingredients have been developed with highly specific mechanisms of action. That raise the question of whether current environmental risk assessment within the scope of the authorization is still sufficient to appropriately assess relevant effects on environmental organisms.

Sustainable chemistry contributes to positive, long-term sustainable development. Chemicals regulations such as REACH can support several aspects of sustainable chemistry. The report gives a systematic analysis on the relations between main elements of REACH (e.g. Registration or Information in the supply chain) and main elements of sustainable chemistry (e.g.

In February 2020, the European Commission and the German Environment Agency organized the 2. workshop on non-chemical alternatives in rodent control (NoCheRo).

As a Party to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC), since 1994 Germany has been obliged to prepare, publish and regularly update national emission inventories of greenhouse gases.