How to rescue the German forest | Germany | News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW

Abraham Smith

When Peter Wohlleben set foot in his home forest in the Eifel, a raven crowed and the 58-year-old couldn’t help but grin. “I’m happy every time I hear it, it’s also a conservation success story – the ravens went extinct here 20 years ago,” he says.

The country’s most famous forester and author of the bestseller “The Hidden Life of Trees” is clearly in his element. He believes it’s not too late to save Germany’s forests.

“The German Forest” has a special meaning for the socio-cultural identity of the country. It is the background of historical and national myths and a metaphor for Germanic culture. Since the beginning of the 19th century, it has become a landscape of longing for romantic poems, fairy tales and legends. And in the Nazi ideology, the motif of the “German Forest” had its propagandistic place, comparable to “Blood and Soil”.

  • A road leads through a dying forest

    It’s about Germany’s forests

    The forests are dying

    German forests are dying in part due to dry and hot summers and heat-loving bark beetle plagues that have destroyed ubiquitous spruce trees. In Germany, more trees died in 2020 than in any other year before, including beech trees, which were planted extensively in the past decade because of their climate resilience. This week’s national forest summit entitled “Waldsterben 2.0” asks what can be done.

  • Stumps of dying trees without leaves

    It’s about Germany’s forests

    Is the climate or forest management to blame?

    While the climate crisis and the rampant bark beetle are causes for concern, the forest summit wants to rethink and reorient the management of forests. An example is the widespread planting of fast-growing conifers after World War II in areas where they are not native. The spruce, which now accounts for 25% of German forests, is an alpine tree that needs wet and cold conditions.

  • A dying forest canopy bordered by a section of green, healthy trees

    It’s about Germany’s forests

    Half the forests could die

    “It is the artificial forest that is dying,” said the German forester and author Peter Wohlleben. “It’s not a natural forest, it’s not a primeval forest,” he told DW. “In the next 10 years, we could see 50% or more of the forest dying due to poor management.” Spruce forests only store about 5% of rainwater due to soil compaction during harvest. Dry summers compound their plight.

  • Peter Wollleben wears glasses and is standing in a forest

    It’s about Germany’s forests

    leave forests alone

    “The best way to combat climate change would be to leave the forests alone,” said Wohlleben, author of the bestselling book The Hidden Life of Trees. “Ecosystems are much more resilient when left to their own devices.” He said monoculture forests need to be repopulated by different native species. Wohlleben is the founder of the West German Forest Academy, which organizes the Knirschwald summit.

  • A dense beech forest

    It’s about Germany’s forests

    Forests are a social network

    Trees are community-oriented — they learn from each other, especially during times of drought, Wohlleben said. When a tree realizes that water is getting scarce, they pass the information on to other trees and together reduce water use. “The more we disrupt this social network, the weaker the forest becomes,” the author told DW.

  • Aerial view of autumn colored trees at Hengsteysee in Hagen, West Germany

    It’s about Germany’s forests

    Biodiversity is the key

    “Protecting biodiversity has to be the basis of everything we do,” said Judith Reise, a researcher at Germany’s Öko-Institut, of the strategies driving this week’s forest summit. Diverse and climate resilient forest ecosystems need time to become carbon neutral after 400 years, she said. But so far only 2.8% of German forests are protected for biodiversity, well below the 5% target for 2020.

  • A forested island seen from the plane

    It’s about Germany’s forests

    Germany needs more waste wood

    The oldest existing forest on the German island of Vilm is only around 300 years old, Reise explained. “We don’t have wilderness in Germany,” she said. Forests have been over-exploited for timber, but also because of the cultural belief that forests are also recreational and that unsightly dead and fallen wood – essential for biodiversity – must be cleared.

  • Big logs in the forest

    It’s about Germany’s forests

    Wood can contribute to climate protection

    But the Forest Summit on August 5-6 will also address the need to promote sustainable timber harvesting to combat climate change, particularly by replacing high-carbon building materials such as steel and concrete. “This could be a very powerful solution,” says Christopher Reyer, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a participant in the Forest Summit.

    Author: Stuart Brown


Since Wohlleben became caretaker of his first forest district 30 years ago, forest rescue has become his life’s work. Due to climate change, this is getting harder by the day. His prognosis: “We are now in the worst drought of the last 100 years. I estimate that we will lose half of the forest area in Germany in the next 10 years.

Forest in critical condition

The annual report on the state of German forests has been drawing frightening pictures for years. Only every fifth tree is without crown damage. The German forest is sick – and that has its reasons.

“If you want to harvest wood, you first need functioning forests, otherwise there will be hardly any jobs in forestry in the future. But we are currently logging at the highest level for decades, as if there were no tomorrow. Forestry works in a similar way to the mineral oil industry, only the profit of the next 10 or 20 years counts, criticizes Wohlleben.

Wohlleben wants to leave the forest alone

It is statements like these by the famous forester that cause headaches for many of the 35,000 employees in the German forestry industry who are wondering how they are going to survive.

Wohlleben’s magic formula, on the other hand, is: 20% protect natural forest, and cultivate the other 80% with native tree species. And his credo: The forest can only be saved if you leave it alone. He cites the area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine as the best example of this – 36 years after the nuclear catastrophe, real wilderness has emerged there again.

Pripyat 2015

Thirty years after the nuclear accident, Pripyat was evacuated and overgrown with trees and bushes

“Where the deciduous forest is allowed to grow undisturbed, it cools down by 10 degrees compared to the open landscape. The forest has been doing this by itself for 300 million years. Forestry, on the other hand, has only recently existed for 300 years – not even half of a tree’s lifespan. And he hasn’t proven that he can do better than that.”

Peter Wohlleben is celebrated for such statements by his growing fan base. The forest academy he founded is booming and the Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck, who was appointed last year, has already taken him for a walk through the forest. The one-day workshop “Forest in climate change” for 98 euros is just as popular as the crash course in species identification or training as a forest guide. The funds flow into the protection of the trees and into the primeval forest project Wohlleben, where buyers sponsor their own protected area for 50 years.

Hermann Monument in the Teutoburg Forest

The Teutoburg Forest is one of the central places in German mythology

The Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, led by Green politician Cem Özdemir, wants to invest 900 million euros in climate-adapted forest management – with a focus on adapting German forests to heat and drought. The air conditioning of nature, as Özdemir calls the forests, is increasingly in danger.

Calls for – unpopular – measures

Christian Ammer is one of Wohlleben’s greatest critics. The forest scientist and professor of silviculture and forest ecology in temperate zones at the University of Göttingen started an online petition five years ago against Wohlleben’s bestseller because it mixed facts with speculation. That doesn’t stop him from praising Wohlleben’s commitment at the same time: “He has my respect because he made the subject of the forest popular.”

“We agree, disagree,” is how Ammer laconically describes their exchange. However, the two are not that far apart, because they have a common goal: to stop the clear-cutting of Germany’s forests. Ammer also calls for unpopular measures: “Of course, forestry will also have to adapt. The question that remains is whether, if less wood comes onto the market, it will then be replaced by more energy-intensive products such as reinforced concrete. Would we really reduce our consumption, or would we end up importing wood from other countries where it might not be used sustainably?”

According to Ammer, Germany needs eight times as much forest to bind its current annual CO2 emissions.

He now sees an urgent need for action: “We have to fundamentally change our mobility and consumer behavior if we want to stop the ongoing climate change.”

This article was originally written in German.

By the way: Every Tuesday the DW editors summarize what is happening in German politics and society. Here you can sign up for the weekly Berlin Briefing email newsletter.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *