The UBA’s motto, For our environment (“Für Mensch und Umwelt”) sums up its mission pretty well. As Germany’s main environmental protection agency , its task is to ensure that its fellow citizens have a healthy environment with clean air and water, free of pollutants to the greatest extent possible.
It concerns peaple working at the UBA with an extremely broad spectrum of issues, including waste avoidance, climate protection, and pesticide approvals. Its 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.
It also provides the general public with information and answer their questions on all of the various issues that UBA addresses. Apart from these activities, UBA implements environmental law by making sure that it is applied in areas such as CO2 trading and approval processes for chemicals, pharmaceutical drugs and pesticides. Its activities are set down in the law that established its agency. UBA overarching mission is early detection of environmental risks and threats so that it can assess them and find viable solutions for them in a timely manner.
It does this by conducting research in its own labs and by outsourcing research to scientific institutions in German and abroad. It is also the German point of contact for numerous international organisations such as WHO. Although UBA topics are broader than the digital economy, one of the topics it presents is called "Digitalisation"