Concept
The text of "Concept" is taken from the official ESB-Homepage!
1. The Environmental Specimen Bank in the context of environmental monitoring
The transfer of the precautionary principle (under the aspect of sustainability and overall national government requirements) into practical federal environmental policy requires a corresponding scientific infrastructure, a comprehensive data base to facilitate identification and assessment of the current environmental situation, and a long-term observation of the chemical, physical and biological processes taking place in the environment with respect to space and time.
The distribution and transportation of substances released into the environment primarily depends on their physical/chemical properties and their stability. All these substances and their conversion products are found in ecosystems, sometimes in higher concentrations.
An ecosystemic characterization and evaluation of representative habitats within Germany – encompassing both the current situation and future development – will provide an important basis to ensure the prompt
- Identification of emerging aberrations within ecosystems
- Assessment of findings about the nature and scope of any aberrations arising and the consequences thereof (damages)
- Collation of findings to enable the prioritisation of political action by the Federal Government, and
- Formulation of a precautionary policy by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, both for nature and environmental conservation, and for human health.
As an important part of environmental monitoring the Environmental Specimen Bank provides a means of solving these tasks by supplying ecological and toxicological evidence in the form of archiving (i.e. storing in a manner which precludes chemical changes) representative soil, plant, animal and human specimens and performing initial characterization thereof.
2. Principles of the Environmental Specimen Bank
The Environmental Specimen Bank is essential to a comprehensive, inter-disciplinary improvement of the Federal Government's legal standards in the field of nature and environmental conservation, particularly for the purposes of:
- Establishment of maximum limits
- Efficiency control of the Federal Government's environmental protection, nature conservation and remediation mechanisms
- Prioritisation (precautionary measures)
Moreover, the Environmental Specimen Bank provides orientation for other environmental monitoring programmes (reference system). In future, it will acquire growing significance within the context of bilateral, multilateral and supranational cooperation.
