“What will happen to the Frankfurt city forest if it continues to be as hot and dry in the summer months as it was this year and it simply doesn’t rain enough anymore?” Rosemarie Heilig (Die Grünen), Frankfurt’s environmental department head, has been asking this question for a long time weeks, but since the exceptional summer of 2018. But for the biologist it is becoming increasingly clear that the German forest is in a “big crisis”. After the spruce trees, which died and were infested with bark beetles in the Taunus in recent years, she can now observe in the Frankfurt city forest how the beech stands that were newly planted 30 years ago are drying up. “The forest is suffering,” sums up Heilig.
This situation is reason for Heilig and the Green Areas Office responsible for the forest to invite to the second forest congress in Frankfurt after 2019 to discuss with the help of experts from all over the country whether and how the Central European forest and also the Frankfurt city forest in times of climate change can be saved.
“Mother of the Forest” is ailing
“The beech, this main tree species, has actually been struck since 2018,” confirms Peter Spathelf, Professor of Applied Silviculture at the University for Sustainable Development in Eberswalde. The beech, which is considered the “mother of the forest”, has problems with its fine roots and its water supply system and is less and less able to pump the little water that is still in the soil into the branches and leaves, Spathelf reports. “The situation is worrying.”
But it doesn’t work without a forest. The experts agreed on that. The forest is seen everywhere as a climate protector. “It is the central carbon store,” says Christopher Reyer from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and an intact forest interior climate “buffers” the extremes. In order to preserve it, deforestation would have to be avoided worldwide and at the same time reforestation and forest management would have to be practiced. Reyer pointed to the controversial demand by some experts to expand the world’s forest areas enormously. According to their reasoning, this is the easiest and fastest way to prevent further global warming. Heron does not seem to share this view. But he makes it clear that the preservation of the forest and, to the same extent, the use of wood as a raw material, especially in the building sector, would make a significant contribution to global carbon dioxide reduction in the foreseeable future. But where is this wood supposed to come from?
“We need action”
“Plantations could cover the necessary global demand for wood,” says Reyer. But leaves it open how he imagines such tree plantations, and even points out that unprotected forests would probably be further pushed back by plantations. However, his task is to think about solutions to global warming, and timber plantations are an idea with a view to climate protection.
But neither Reyer nor the German forestry experts, who, like Ralf-Volker Nagel from the Northwest German Forest Research Institute, are concerned with which tree species and which forest structures can help to make the forest more resistant – and quickly, have any solutions. Nagel does not consider the idea of simply leaving the forest to its own devices and hoping for the power of nature, as propagated by the prominent writing forester Peter Wohlleben, to be sufficient. “We need action,” he says. The pace that a naturally changing forest has cannot keep up with that of climate change.