Research

The overall objective of the project is to improve the environmental and health impact of Red Cross emergency operations in urban areas, displacement sites or protected camps through improved environmental sanitation emergency solutions that meet global quality standards. A previous project together with Red Cross verified and recalculated an existing emergency faecal sludge treatment plant (FSTP unit) as basis for this pilot plant using proven technologies.

The project "development in flood prone areas: assessment of flood management alternatives" has the goal to develope integrated strategies to reduce flood risk at the federal level to support the implementation of the EU flood risk directive. Previous project have shown the necessity to analyse and to assess the various flood risk management alternatives. There seems to be also the need for an improved communication and cooperation among the various actors in this domain. The instruments should be assesed with respect to legislative and economic criteria and their potential for integrated application to reduce flood risk. The deficits of the instruments should be assessed especially in APSFR regions.

The project considers nanocarriers as a case study for novel materials that pose challenges for chemical regulation and regulatory risk assessment. To this end, the project will conduct extensive research on existing and newly developed nanocarriers and their (potential) applications. On this basis, a systematic compilation will be prepared. From the overview thus obtained, exemplary nanocarriers are to be selected for further investigation which, with regard to their appearance or their application, are expected to pose particular challenges for environmental assessment. For these selected nanocarriers, test strategies are to be developed and implemented that will enable an investigation of their environmental behavior and the possible release of the transported active ingredient under environmentally relevant conditions. In this way, the influence of encapsulation on the change in the environmental behavior of active substances will be determined as an example and the implications for an appropriate evaluation of the environmental behavior in the context of risk assessment will be described in more detail.