Publications

The Blue Angel is the German Government’s label for environmentally friendly products and services. As the first environmental label worldwide, it has stood for independence and credibility for over 35 years. It is an eco-label you can trust.

This report examines the political context and reasoning of these sources of potential demand to depart from the established system and offers suggestions for further reforms or measures to take to preserve some of the benefits of the erstwhile framework.

In Germany, ensuring water supply is a mandatory duty of the state. Responsibility lies with the municipalities, which can use a range of organisational and legal forms to comply with this duty. Applied to the abstracted water volumes this means that the public water supply abstracted around 5,1 billion cubic meters of water to supply the population with drinking water.

Functional marine mammal acoustic communication evolved under natural ambient noise levels, which makes communication vulnerable to anthropogenic noise sources. In this report, we consider the potential long-range effects of airgun noise on marine mammal communication range.

After agriculture in Germany has become more intensive over the past decades, many populations of farmland birds and mammals are in an unfavourable conservation status. For 27 farmland bird species and 22 farmland mammal species we compile trends, habitat (crop) selection, threats and risk management measures.

Under the European Chemicals legislation REACH the release of a substance into the environment is estimated on the basis of emission factors. For this purpose industry can deduce realistic emission factors by developing specific Environmental Release Categories (spERCs) and documenting them in a corresponding fact sheet.

The implementation of a nanoproduct register as an instrument to increase the transparency on the use of nanomaterials in the EU and to ensure the regulatory oversight on nanomaterials has been discussed for quite a time.

This report was inspired by the work we did on a project funded by the EEA that ran between June 2011 and March 2012. One of the main aims of the EEA project was to provide examples of how the evaluation of global mega trends presented in the SOER 2010 could be applied to regional topics, like resource scarcity or environmental goals.

This report first describes the two processes for the development of SDGs and the post-2015 development agenda, and the options to integrate the results of both processes in order to arrive at one set of goals. It goes on to discuss the possible structure of a set of SDGs, and discusses a number of topic clusters, as an illustration of what possible SDGs could look like.

Annex B to the Methodological Convention 2.0 for Estimates of Environmental Damage contains UBA’s recommendations for best-practice cost rates for greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants and, based on this, estimates of the environmental costs of transport and of power and heat generation.

The background paper presents an overview of key contents of the Methodological Convention 2.0 for Estimates of Environmental Costs and its annexes.

The current exposure assessment for pesticide entries into water bodies considers a water body model which represents a realistic worst case for water bodies in the agricultural landscape.