Home » News » Environment – Freiburg im Breisgau – Forest strategy should set goals for the coming years – Knowledge

Environment – Freiburg im Breisgau – Forest strategy should set goals for the coming years – Knowledge

Stuttgart (dpa / lsw) – After a multi-million dollar emergency plan with short-term help for the severely damaged forest, the state, business and science are also setting long-term goals for the forest with their own strategy. “Due to climate change, we need a strategic direction for how we manage the forest,” said Baden-Württemberg’s Forest Minister Peter Hauk (CDU) on Thursday at an online forum in Freiburg.

With the total of 21 defined goals of the new forest strategy, the course was to be set for the coming decades and the forest to be made climate-stable by 2050. “The contingency plan can only have been a start,” said Hauk. “We have to think ahead.” It takes a whole bunch of short-term and long-term measures to preserve the forest.

In the past months, the most important content for a forest strategy had been exchanged and recorded in discussions and working groups. The forestry and forest owners as well as nature conservationists, tourism, regional and youth associations, urban planning offices and scientists were involved. The cornerstones of the long-term strategy should relate to forest management in times of climate change as well as the forest as a recreational area, communication and biodiversity or wildlife management. In the short term, among other things, digitization could be converted, said Hauk. Among other things, he proposed a forest owner portal and a “forest cloud” in order to be able to bundle and exchange data more easily.

The minister said the strategy paper was merely a non-static framework and gave a direction of thrust. Numerous further discussions are necessary in order to decide on more concrete steps. Most of all, people have to be open to change. The dynamics of climate change cannot be influenced “by simply doing nothing,” said Hauk.

The forest is increasingly becoming a patient not only in Baden-Württemberg. According to the current forest status report by the Ministry of Forestry, 46 percent of the forest area in the south-west is considered to be significantly damaged; in the previous year the value was three percentage points lower. According to the report, damage can be attributed to the consequences of heat and drought, and the bark beetle also leaves its mark. Above all, the spruce, still the most common tree species in the country, is developing worryingly.

The environmental association BUND called the strategy paper a “first rough roadmap” that it was going in the right direction. However, there is no clear commitment to forest conversion in favor of disruption-resistant deciduous trees. “We have to rely on mixed deciduous forests with oak, maple and linden, which are better able to cope with the challenges of the climate crisis and withstand storms and dry periods better than spruce monocultures,” said BUND state chairwoman Brigitte Dahlbender. “Otherwise forest dieback 3.0 cannot be prevented.”

The Naturschutzbund Deutschland (Nabu) appealed to foresters and forest owners not only to take care of their own forest, but also to become more socially visible. You have to make yourself effective as a climate ambassador, demanded the Nabu state chairman Johannes Enssle. He praised the new strategic direction: “The all-rounder forest should supply wood, filter water, fix carbon, protect animals and plants and at the same time be a place of work and a place of relaxation and spiritual inspiration for stressed people,” said Enssle. So it is good to think about how the demands on the forests can be meaningfully reconciled.

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