Umweltbundesamt

The UBA’s motto, For our environment (“Für Mensch und Umwelt”) sums up our mission pretty well, we feel. As Germany’s main environmental protection agency , our task is to ensure that our fellow citizens have a healthy environment with clean air and water, free of pollutants to the greatest extent possible. Here at the UBA, we concern ourselves with an extremely broad spectrum of issues, including waste avoidance, climate protection, and pesticide approvals.

Our work centers around gathering data concerning the state of the environment, investigating the relevant interrelationships and making projections – and then, based on these findings, providing federal bodies such as the Ministry of the Environment with policy advice. We also provide the general public with information and answer your questions on all of the various issues that we address. Apart from these activities, we implement environmental law by making sure that it is applied in areas such as CO2 trading and approval processes for chemicals, pharmaceutical drugs and pesticides. Our activities are set down in the law that established our agency.

Our overarching mission is early detection of environmental risks and threats so that we can assess them and find viable solutions for them in a timely manner. We do this by conducting research in our own labs and by outsourcing research to scientific institutions in German and abroad. We are also the German point of contact for numerous international organizations such as WHO.