Wege zur Berücksichtigung ökologischer Gegebenheiten in der Raumordnung

The theme set to me was: Methods of taking ecological facts into account within regional planning. I have tried to describe one of these methods in more details. As I said at the beginning there are several comparable approaches, some of which are confined to a few ecological aspects, some others being detailed attempts to describe the environment in quantitative terms. But these differences are not really important. What is important-and I want to stress this once more-is that: 1. We have at our disposal methods which allow to process ecological data in a way that they can be taken into account within regional planning, which means in preventive environmental politics. 2. The examples shown have been taken from mappings already carried out, thus an environmental mapping is feasible. The newest results originate in nine case-studies, which we have carried out for the Commission of the European Communities and in collaboration with national expert groups in the all member states of the EC. These two statements are of importance, as they make it more and more difficult to pretend that environmental facts could not be considered because the relevant information was not accessible or was not understandable to the non-expert respectively the politician. Of course numerous ecological relations are not yet or not yet sufficiently known and for decades ecological research will be an urgent task; but-we certainly known enoght that we can start taking our natural environment into account to a somewhat appropriate extend while planning- or let's say it a bit more brutally but concisely - while using natural resources and using, or exploiting our landscape.