Publications | Umweltbundesamt

Chemicals, Economy | Consumption, Sustainability | Strategies | International matters

Environmental protection under TTIP

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The declared objective of the planned free trade agreement with the US (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – TTIP) is to unify EU and USA standards as much as possible by regulatory cooperation. However, an improper design of regulatory cooperation carries considerable risks for environmental protection in the EU: environmental standards might be lowered and environmental properties of...read more

Soil | Land

Poster: Soil of the year 2015

Surface Water Gley

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Each year, an Expert Panel selects the "soil of the year". In the year 2015, it's the Surface Water Gley. He's temporarily wet and dry at times. He must be managed carefully. This poster shows how he looks. There are 40,000 km2 of which in Germany are. This is equivalent to the surface area of the Netherlands.read more

Chemicals

UBA and Tukes concerned about the environmental impacts of veterinary medicines

Joint press mailing on the lunch debate: Environmental risk of veterinary medicines, 4 March 2015

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The Finnish Safety and Chemicals Agency (Tukes) and the German Federal Environment Agency, Umweltbundesamt (UBA), are concerned about the environmental risks of veterinary medicines. In their opinion, a proposal adopted in September by the European Commission – for a new Regulation on Veterinary Medicinal Products – does not include sufficient provisions to ensure a high level of environmental pro...read more

Chemicals

Statistical Analysis of a Laboratory Study about the Effects of Bisphenol A on the Reproduction of the Ramshorn snail Marisa cornuarietis (Mesogastropoda: Ampullariidae)

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This report provides the results of a statistical analysis of an experiment with Marisa cornu-arietis (Prosobranchia), the subtropical Ramshorn snail, which was performed during the EU Project “Comprendo”. This project aimed at studying the possible impact of endocrine dis-rupters mainly on invertebrate species. Exposure experiments with Bisphenol A (BPA) were performed as semistatic renewal syste...read more

Economy | Consumption

Green Software

Analysis of potentials for optimizing software development and deployment for resource conservation

Subproject 3: Establishing and exploiting potentials for environmental protection in information and communication technology (Green IT)

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Although software products are immaterial goods, their use can bring about significant materials and energy flows. Software characteristics determine which hardware capacities are made available and how much electric energy is used by end-user devices, networks, and data centers. The connection between software characteristics and the demand for natural resources caused by the manufacture and use...read more

Chemicals

Protection of terrestrial non-target plant species in the regulation of environmental risks of pesticides

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Before a plant protection product is approved for placement on the market, an assessment of the overall acceptability of negative effects on non-target species in arable land and adjacent areas has to be performed according to European guidelines. The guideline for the risk assessment of non-target terrestrial plants (NTTP) is currently revised by the European Food Safety authority (EFSA) to integ...read more

Soil | Land

Legal Instruments to implement the objective “Land Degradation Neutral World” in International Law

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The protection of fertile soils is a precondition for sustainable development. In the final document of the conference of the United Nations on sustainable development in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20 Conference), the international community thus agreed to strive for a “land degradation neutral world”. The legal study by Ecologic Institute, Berlin, firstly scrutinizes some national legislati...read more

Water

The impact of shale gas on the costs of climate policy

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This report investigates the effects of an increased exploitation of shale gas reserves around the globe and the extent to which it can serve as a low-cost GHG mitigation option. We compare a scenario of global shale gas exploitation with a scenario in which shale gas use is very limited. Both scenarios are modelled with the global techno-economic POLES model and rely on a high regional disaggrega...read more