German Environment Prize: “There is little time left” - researchers are pushing for more speed in climate protection

Katrin Böhning-Gaese and Hans Joosten have a mission that unites them.

Both have been fighting climate change for years.

On Sunday, the internationally renowned researcher in Darmstadt was awarded the German Environmental Prize 2021 from the German Federal Environment Foundation (DBU) by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Both conduct research in areas where it is actually quite straightforward to do something about climate change.

The ecologist Katrin Böhning-Gaese, who conducts research at the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, has a very simple recipe for this: more green in the cities, less concrete in the industrial areas.

Rock gardens are an environmental sin for them, large concrete surfaces in cities and towns could easily be planted with portable planters.

The researcher, who was born in Oberkochen in 1964, is primarily responsible for agriculture.

In the past, monocultures would have displaced biodiversity more and more.

Both animals and plants are affected.

In southern Hesse, this can be seen above all in the huge arable land covered with foils and greenhouses that are used for growing asparagus and strawberries.

"Biodiversity is our livelihood"

“Biodiversity is our livelihood,” she says.

Böhning-Gaese warns of a net that will become more and more holey with the extinction of species, “before it will someday no longer support humanity”.

Of eight million animal and plant species in the world, around one million are threatened with extinction.

Everyone can do something for biodiversity, in their own garden, on the balcony.

Above all, however, agriculture is challenged.

"More hedges, less fertilization, the reduction of meat and less food waste": these are their key words.

The European Union (EU) must change course with its agricultural subsidies.

Instead of promoting productivity, a larger part of the approximately six billion euros that are paid out to farmers from the EU budget each year must be used for organic farming.

"We need forty times more space for one kilogram of beef than for one kilogram of potatoes," says Böhning-Gaese.

For her colleague Hans Joosten, potatoes are also a problem.

In Germany, they are often grown on dry moorland.

Bog potatoes are considered a delicacy in northern Germany, for example.

But moist bogs are particularly important in the fight against climate change, says Joosten.

Worldwide they are spread over around 400 million hectares of land, which corresponds to around three percent of the area, but on which they could bind up to 30 percent of the pollutants - if they were not dried out.

In Germany things are particularly bad about the moors

According to Joosten's findings, the condition of the moors is particularly bad in Germany. More than 90 percent have been drained, 83 percent of the dry moorland is used for agriculture. This is fatal for the environment, because all the pollutants that the moors have stored are released back into the environment when they are dried out. Up to seven percent of the greenhouse gases in Germany are caused by the drained moorland. Wet bogs are gigantic carbon stores and, if recultivated, could make a significant contribution to achieving the Paris Climate Agreement.

That is why the researcher calls for 50,000 hectares of peatlands to be rewetted in Germany every year.

“We have little time left,” warns Joosten.

After all, in some regions of Germany work has now begun to reactivate moors.

In the Rhine-Main area this is happening at the Pfungstädter Moor.

Farmers would have to be ready to face the watering of the moors on their arable land.

Agriculture must be developed for them that also works under wet conditions.

Paludiculture is the new technical term for it.

Cattails and mosses could be grown on wet moorland, which could be used as potting soil, ecological building materials or for the production of bioenergy.

Farmers would have new sources of income.

"If you tackle things, you can also change something"

“Those who tackle things can also change something,” said the Secretary General of the German Federal Environment Foundation during the ceremony. With their work, the researchers showed the drama of the climate crisis and the overexploitation of nature and biodiversity, but at the same time also opened up ways to protect people, animals and the environment. Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter, Chairwoman of the DBU Board of Trustees and State Secretary in the Federal Environment Ministry, demanded: “We have to take climate and species protection even more seriously”.

Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also said this and referred to the recent environmental disasters in the Ahr valley and on the Erft.

“The consequences of climate change have also reached us in Europe.

And the less we do now, the more brutally they will hit future generations ”.

But the work of the two honorees shows: “We are not standing helplessly on the edge of the abyss”.

Climate change and the extinction of species are not irreversible.

"What we have in front of us is a change in society as a whole," said the Federal President.

Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze also supported the arguments of the Federal President and demanded during the ceremony in front of around 350 guests that politics and research should devote themselves more intensively than before to the pressing environmental problems.

"We don't have the time anymore, we have to get faster now."