Bold decisions today will trigger positive interactions for tomorrow

With an audience of around 1,200 guests Steinmeier said, that the prize winners were encouraging because they were pointing to solutions and seeing ecological transformation as an opportunity for Germany. As inventors and engineers, as scientists or entrepreneurs, they would find new solutions. The prize winner Kögel-Knabner is a role model for future generations of researchers. She adds the puzzle piece of soil use to a much larger picture – the global climate and its “truly alarming change”. It is not only factories and power plants that are responsible for climate change but also the use of soil as the planet’s major carbon sinks. Depending on how humans use it, they fuel or slow down climate change. Months of droughts, torrential floods, and destructive storms can be observed in countries of the southern hemisphere. In Europe, too, heat waves are on the rise. Soil science can help people adapt their agriculture to these extremes, which is why the environmental prize winner’s research is so important.

According to the Federal President, the prize winner Schneider acted as a responsible entrepreneur before many others became active. He had shown with true pioneering achievement that environmentally conscious and entrepreneurial activity were not a contradiction, and that he had made this his recipe for success. He had “fully streamlined products and production for sustainability”. Among other things, this means a high degradation rate of surfactants and packaging made of recycled plastic. If more people took a closer look at the supermarket shelf, the pressure on manufacturers to be more environmentally friendly would increase. However, this does not relieve politicians of their responsibility and their regulatory mandate to intervene where the market does not ensure enough or not at all enough environmental and climate protection. Instruments such as transparency, consumer protection through seals of quality, prices that reflect the true costs to the environment and – where necessary – bans are also used.

The prize winners themselves made their positions clear once again in films that were recorded during the ceremony and in discussions with moderator Judith Rakers. Kögel-Knabner said that soils must not only store carbon in order to counter climate change. They would also have to be fertile at the same time, because a constantly growing world population would also have to be fed. An understanding of the role of soils in climate protection has not yet reached society. A handful of soil carries more organisms than humans live on the earth. Climate-related problems such as the thawing of permafrost soils in Siberia are not a regional problem due to the release of greenhouse gases, but a global one.

Prize winner Schneider pointed out that companies should consistently commit themselves to sustainability and be responsible for making attractive offers to consumers without pushing them too much into doing without. This is ultimately not reasonable for many. But this is also possible without compromising ecology. It is important to ensure that the products are easy to recycle as early as the development phase. Different types of plastics should not be combined in such a way that they can no longer be separated. The paradox is that plastic could indeed be one of the most ecological materials of our time, “if we learn to handle it properly”. With a small amount of energy, it can be recycled almost loss-free, so that no more waste is produced.