1.5.1 Land Pollution (Nature and Soil Conservation)

Nature conservation and landscape preservation play an important part both in climate protection and in possible adjustment to climate change. This non-technical side of climate protection and adjustment has tended to be neglected hitherto in climate policy worldwide. Still the major role of soils in storing carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) has attracted too little attention in the discussion to date.

The wide range of different soils involved, the ways these are subjected to pressure and the sectors that cause these ecological burdens, as well as the long-term nature of the changes make it difficult to develop a transparent soil regulation regime. The strategic direction set out by soil protection concepts should then aim to

• raise the awareness on the part of users and the general public of the multifunctional tasks performed by soils;
• expand the function- and location-specific ceilings and guiding values for soil loads as well as the verifiable quality objectives, and integrate these into existing legal provisions (soil conservation, water protection, nature conservation laws);
• take soil protection into more account when identifying limits for emissions and immissions (Federal Immission Control Law - BImSchG), and extend existing concepts for the identification of limits (such as the "critical load", which takes into account the relations between nutrient content and content of harmful substances) to include additional parameters;
• compare soil protection regulations with the targets set for other environmental media, and thus build a consistent system of regulations.