In the early 1970s, the FDP politician and then-interior minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher called for the creation of an environmental authority to match similar bodies in the US and Sweden. Against resistance, especially by the Ministry of Health, which feared a loss of competence in the field of environmental protection, the Federal Office of Environmental Affairs was created in 1973, and on 22 July 1974, became the Federal Environment Agency, as an independent federal authority, based in Berlin.[6][7] The decision of the Bundestag, on 19 June 1974, which established West Berlin as the seat of the office, led to official protests by the GDR state department the following day.[8]
Presidency
The president of the Umweltbundesamt from 1974 to 1995 was the lawyer Heinrich von Lersner. He was succeeded by economist Andreas Troge, who led the agency until 2009, before ceding it to Jochen Flasbarth, who remained until 2013. Maria Krautzberger led the department between 2014 and 2020 and was succeeded by Dirk Messner[9]
^Markus Balser, Klaus Ott: Geheime Daten – Schon lange wurden Abgas-Manipulationen vermutet. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21 April 2016, S. 19: "Das Umweltbundesamt mit 1500 Mitarbeitern gilt als die größte und mächtigste Umweltbehörde Europas."
