A spruce forest in Oberstedten.
Image: Finn Winkler
Let nature do it? reforestation? Plant foreign tree species? About the argument about how to help the German forests: the start of our new series.
VLast month there was a “Forest Climate Summit” in Berlin: two days of discussions on the future of the forest, invited by the “Forest Academy” of bestselling author and forester Peter Wohlleben. A few months earlier, the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Jena had organized a three-day “Forest Climate Forum”. Wohlleben had already organized a “National Forest Summit” in 2021. This followed shortly after a Ministry of Agriculture event of the same name. Four crisis conferences on the forest in just over a year – that is an expression of two problems. One thing: the forest is doing badly. The other: That is pretty much the only thing on which there is consensus. Opinions differ on what to do.
Regarding problem number one: Two years ago, the Saarland had to be used to illustrate this – always gladly used to make a size ratio imaginable. The area of forest in Germany wiped out by drought, fires and the bark beetle: 245,000 hectares, almost the size of Saarland. In 2022, the federal state has already become far too small, 450,000 hectares of forest have been destroyed. And even where brown tree skeletons are not yet lined up like in the Harz Mountains, the trees show that they are not doing well.
