Environmental Protection in Germany – an Introduction

The rapid reconstruction and the immense economic growth of the 1950s and 60s in Germany led to dramatic environmental pollution in the form of contaminated rivers and lakes, polluted air and a badly marred and spoilt landscapes. It was above all the discontent of a great number of citizens that has led to a systematic fight against environmental pollution since the 1970s.

In 1971, state responsibility for the environment found its expression in the federal government’s first environmental programme in which environmental policy is defined as “the totality of measures necessary to assure an environment for human beings such as they need for their health and human dignity, to protect the soil, air and water, plants and animals from long-term effects of human encroachments, and to remove the damages or harm of such”.

In the German Democratic Republic, overexploitation of natural resources was regarded, in accordance with Socialist Unity Party ideology, as characteristic of capitalism. The political leadership and state controlled media largely ignored the dramatic environmental problems in their own country. Existing data about the actual state of the environment were kept secret. Many regions of the GDR, particularly the brown coal districts and centres of the chemical industry, were so polluted that they would have had to be classified as uninhabitable under the safety thresholds recommended by the UNO.

Environmental protection in the Basic Law

In the Federal Republic, a variety of environmental laws and regulations have been enacted since the beginning of the 1970s. These range from the Waste Disposal Act (1972), the Federal Control of Pollution Act (1974) and the Federal Nature Conservation Act (1796) to the mandatory environmental impact assessment (1990).

In 1994 environmental protection was written into the Basic Law in the form of a national objective (Article 20a): “Acknowledging its responsibility to future generations, the state provides protection for natural resources and animals within the constitution through legislation and in accordance with law in the form of executive authority and the administration of justice”.

In practice, of course, the strengthened demands for a healthy and intact environment came up against limits, especially because (well-organised) economic interests opposed them. As a cross-cutting challenge that pertains to nearly all fields of politics, an effective environmental policy is made more difficult by the fact that its success depends upon political and social actors in all fields of politics pursuing it as their guiding goal and, in case of doubt, giving it priority over other interests.

From after-care to prevention

At the beginning, environmental protection in Germany too followed the after-care principle: so-called “end-of-the-pipe technologies” such as purification and filtration plants were to repair the damage done in the course of the economic process and so ensure clean water and pure air.

Today state environmental policy takes its bearings from four principles: according to the polluter pay principle, polluters are to be held responsible for the costs of environmental destruction and so in this way encouraged to avoid pollution from the outset. The precautionary principle works in a similar manner and is intended to bring environmental considerations to bear in the economic process as early as possible. The cooperative principle is intended to integrate all participating actors in the process of environmental decisions, while the integrative principle is intended to bring environmental protection into action in all areas of politics.

Taken together, these four principles flow into the fundamental principle of sustainability, according to which the use of natural resources should not bring the total system of the natural environment out of balance, and so ensure its capacity for regeneration and its long-term existence.

Numerous state environmental regulations, together with a heightened environmental awareness in the population, have contributed to considerable improvement in the condition of the environment in Germany in the course of the last decades. We owe many of these improvements to the reunification of Germany – one of its consequences was to replace nearly the entire chemical and heavy industry of the former GDR with more environmental-friendly industries.

The global dimension of the ecological question

Throughout society and amongst political parties in Germany there exists a broad consensus concerning environmental policy. Thus the programmes of all the political parties today that play a role at the federal level are committed to environmental protection, even if they have virtually insurmountable differences on decisive questions – for instance, about the use of atomic energy.

Germany is not only one of the leading nations in the area of environmental technology in international comparison: within the European Union and in environmental regimens such as the Kyoto Protocol for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, it is also one of the driving forces. In everyday life, too, Germans have repeatedly led the way by giving good examples – for instance, with waste separation. Yet problems still remain, particularly with respect to species conservation and urban sprawl.

The pollution of the atmosphere by so-called greenhouse gases, which is blamed as a cause of climate change, constitutes one of the most urgent problems. Climate change makes the global dimension of the ecological question whether and how we can survive in future especially clear. Unlike the great questions of the past, this question no longer addresses itself so much to national states as to the international community of states and global society.