It’s a quiet suffering and dying from the current heat. These days, the biologist and species protection expert at Bund Naturschutz (BN), Christine Margraf, keeps receiving news of moles fleeing from parched meadows and dying a little later, of completely dehydrated hedgehogs and of drying up ponds and streams, in which hundreds of salamander larvae die. Many peat soils are also dry as straw.
“There were always fluctuations in the weather and extremes,” says Margraf. “But now the accumulation of dry summers, periods of drought and record temperatures leave nature and many species no time to recover.” Despite the heavy rains this spring, the heat and drought damage has once again reached dramatic proportions. And summer has only just begun.
The increasingly frequent heat and drought damage in nature is usually associated with global warming. But that’s only one side. The other is homemade. It is the far-reaching transformation of the former natural landscapes into modern cultural landscapes – through modern agriculture as well as through the construction of more and more settlements, commercial and industrial complexes and traffic routes, but also through the straightening and channeling of most rivers and streams. Experts such as Professor Karl Auerswald, who holds the Chair for Grassland Studies at the School of Life Sciences at the Technical University of Munich, have long been convinced that “the bad effects of the increasingly frequent drought periods are also regional and local in our country and not global CO2-driven climate change”.
At the BN they see it like Auerswald. “Rewetted moors, renatured rivers, streams and meadows and landscapes rich in structure with many islands of trees, hedges and groves do not dry out as quickly as our normal agricultural landscapes,” says Margraf. “They offer much longer retreats for animals and plants during hot periods like the current one.” The BN calls for a combination of immediate and long-term measures to keep current and future drought damage in nature as low as possible.
According to the BN, one measure that should be implemented regularly during hot periods is not mowing public green spaces and the shoulders of water bodies. In the long term, the renaturation of rivers, streams and, above all, the moors will help. Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) has promised the latter for a long time, but the Free State is lagging behind his announcements.
From the point of view of the BN, other nature conservation measures are also decisive for strengthening the water balance. The organization includes, for example, the state-wide biotope network that has also been promised for a long time, the conversion of the forests, but also the rehabilitation and uncovering of the small bodies of water and wet areas that have been filled in the past decades and the consistent creation of green areas in settlement areas. The BN is convinced that the Free State is relying too much on technical solutions in its fight against dry periods, such as the new national drinking water network from Lake Constance to Franconia and the Upper Palatinate, which Söder presented on Wednesday. “Technical solutions like this certainly make sense,” says BN state representative Martin Geilhufe. “But they’re only half the battle.”