“You all are taking new approaches to the issues of environmental and climate protection. And in this way, you are not only achieving breakthroughs, but are also demonstrating solutions and alternatives, ways in which we can improve our future. And that is incredibly important in this age of crises, upheaval and uncertainty.” With this statement, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier praised the work and dedication of the winners of the DBU’s 26th German Environmental Prize. In front of an audience of around 1,200 guests, which included the Jordanian Ambassador to Germany, Basheer Zoubi, the Parliamentary State Secretary of the Jordanian Ministry of Water and Irrigation, Ali Subah, Thuringia’s Minister of Environment, Anja Siegesmund, and previous DBU award winner and former federal minister, Klaus Töpfer, Steinmeier presented the richest independent environmental prize in Europe to marine biologist Antje Boetius (from the Alfred Wegener Institute’s Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven) and an interdisciplinary team of wastewater experts from Leipzig made up of Roland A. Müller, Manfred van Afferden, Mi-Yong Lee and Wolf-Michael Hirschfeld.
With this year’s prize, the DBU is highlighting the importance of our oceans when it comes to protecting our climate, biodiversity and food supply, while also warning of the dangers of climate change, pollution and overfishing. This year’s prize also draws attention to the United Nations’ call to action to provide the world’s population with safe drinking water and adequate sanitation by the year 2030, which would serve to significantly improve living conditions around the globe.
Protecting our oceans protects our climate
“Water is essential to our survival. It not only allows us to live, but also makes life worth living,” said Steinmeier. For this reason, he was pleased to present the German Environmental Prize to scientists who are working to protect the world’s fresh water supplies and oceans. In his statement praising Boetius, the German President pointed out that protecting our oceans is crucial in order to protect our climate: “You have demonstrated to me that bacteria play an extremely important role when it comes to climate protection. They trap and break down methane gas, a greenhouse gas that is present in large quantities on the ocean floor. These tiny organisms down there play a critical role in ensuring that our planet doesn’t heat up even faster.”
The guiding theme of Boetius’ research is the role the ocean floor and its inhabitants play in the deep-sea ecosystem. Her most frequently quoted scientific publications address marine microbiology, and specifically delve into the anaerobic oxidation of methane. To evaluate this process, Boetius investigates the microorganisms that live in the deep sea and that are responsible for breaking down methane without the presence of oxygen. The global warming potential of methane is 25 times that of carbon dioxide.
“The effects of climate change are already apparent around the world, and they are a matter of life and death,” warned Steinmeier. He added: “And naturally it will be fatal if one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the world withdraws and calls all of our multilateral partnerships into question. And yet, we can and will continue to make progress when all of us who still believe in multilateral solutions work together – and there are a lot of us around the world, even in the US!”
Decentralised wastewater treatment systems as a sustainable solution
The team around the group of researchers at the Environment and Biotechnology Centre of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Müller, van Afferden, Lee) and Wolf-Michael Hirschfeld, the initiator of the Training and Demonstration Centre for Decentralized Sewage Treatment, is dedicated to working across national borders and research disciplines. “They have succeeded in developing a new, flexible system that can be used to treat water directly on location so it can then be used for irrigation. Thanks to their decentralised system, Jordan will be able to nearly double its quantity of treated wastewater by the year 2025.”
In Jordan, the team was able to supplement the existing system with decentralised, flexible wastewater treatment systems. These systems make it possible to treat wastewater at the point of origin while also protecting the groundwater from wastewater contamination, thus preserving drinking water as a resource. German President Steinmeier emphasized that the work of the Leipzig-based team of wastewater experts is making a significant contribution towards helping Jordan – one of the most arid countries in the world – move closer to the United Nations’ goal of clean water for all, even though the country has opened its doors to more than 650,000 Syrian war refugees. According to Steinmeier, “the fact that Jordan continues to welcome these refugees is an act of generosity that cannot be overstated.”
As members of this year’s jury for the German Environmental Prize, Heidi Foth, Director of the Institute for Environmental Toxicology at the Faculty of Medicine of Martin Luther University Halle, and Bettina Lorenz, co-founder of the initiative “Zukunft selber machen – Junge Nachhaltigkeitsideen e.V.” and DBU fellowship recipient, discussed the achievements of the 2018 prize recipients. Foth praised Boetius for being able to take a relatively complex field of research and disseminate it into the wider society. About the prize winners from Leipzig, Bettina Lorenz said that they were not only able to provide the technological services required to develop wastewater treatment systems, but also installed these systems in a region that is unusual for such a technology-oriented group.
Prize winners make their positions clear
In films that were shown during the ceremony and in discussions with the moderator, Judith Rakers, the prize winners once again made their positions clear. Antje Boetius said that the deep sea is one of the largest inhabited environments on the planet, and yet we have only researched a fraction of a per cent of it. “Even though we are still in the discovery phase, we are constantly confronted with waste,” said Boetius, reporting on the increasing pollution affecting the oceans. When asked what she worries about most in terms of climate change, she replied: “That everything is moving faster than our models are predicting. That would shrink the time frame we have to act.”
Roland A. Müller, a member of the Leipzig-based team that received this year’s prize, pointed out the fact that approximately 90 per cent of wastewater around the world is discharged into the environment either untreated or poorly treated. For that reason, it must be our goal to significantly increase the amount of clean, treated water available “for future generations.” Müller, summarising: “Naturally, as researchers we can’t save the world; but I think that our work has demonstrated concrete ways in which we can help to conserve resources and promote wastewater treatment.”
Attendees included the Parliamentary State Secretary of the Federal Ministry for the Environment and Head of the Board of Trustees of the DBU, Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter, who read a Declaration on Diversity and Tolerance on behalf of the DBU Board of Trustees, as well as DBU General Secretary Alexander Bonde. The award ceremony included musical accompaniment by the Berlin-based quartet GlasBlasSing, which makes music solely using different bottles that have been filled with water, thus demonstrating its own unique approach to waste reduction and recycling.
For more information, images, and videos of the award ceremony as well as the 2018 German Environmental Prize brochure, please refer to the German Environmental Prize website or our Flickr album. You can also read more about the work being done by the prize winners in the DBU newsletter 07/2018.
