Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ

Making sustainable use of landscapes

Preventing or reducing risks for humans and nature - that's the work of the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research - UFZ. Its approach: Responsibility for the environment means more than rehabilitating, renaturising or restructuring landscapes. Preventive environmental research is becoming ever more important. This is why the UFZ defines its Mission Statement as follows: The purpose of our research is to ensure sustainable land use and to help secure quality of life in cultivated landscapes.

The UFZ assesses and prepares its research findings to enable them to be used by public (state) and private (business and industry) sectors in their decision-making processes and to be transferred to regions with similar problems. And so the UFZ advises the relevant government offices on the rehabilitation, ecological restructuring and management of ecosystems. While business and industry also consult the UFZ on the development of environmental technologies and environmentally-compatible products and production processes.

The work calls for landscape-oriented, scientific research and environmental medicine to be closely interconnected with the social sciences, ecological economics and environmental law.

The key areas of landscape-oriented research are:

• High-polluted, industrial landscapes - pollutant behaviour and rehabilitation strategies
• Inland waterways - development and regeneration
• Urban ecology and urban development
• Biodiversity, land use and resource protection
• Environmental technologies and biotechnologies

More cooperation with international partners

The UFZ cooperates with research institutes and universities on practically all continents of the world. At present, the UFZ is very strongly involved and committed to intensively networking environmental research in Europe, not least under the EU's 6th Research Framework Programme. The most important initiative is called PEER (Partnership for European Environmental Research), a strategic alliance involving seven major environmental research centres in Europe (ALTERRA, Netherlands; CEH, Britain; CEMAGREF, France; NERI, Denmark; SYKE, Finland; JRC-IES, Italy; UFZ, Germany). These centres joined forces and concentrated their efforts in PEER in order to pursue a joint strategy in the environmental sciences and to improve research in the field of ecological sustainability.

The global component of UFZ research is expressed especially in its research cooperation with Latin America and the Middle East. Besides pure land use research, the UFZ's cooperation in Latin America concentrates on social-scientific and urban problems. In the Middle East, the UFZ works in the triangle Israel-Palestine-Jordan, with its focus clearly on the practical problems of water quality and water usage.

Contact

Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research - UFZ

Permoserstraße 15
04318 Leipzig

+49 341 235-0
+49 341 235-2649
info(at)ufz.de

http://www.ufz.de