From the point of view of the Green politician Rosi Steinberger, it is a double scandal. “One is that around ten hectares of free landscape are concreted over here every day and Black-Orange doesn’t really do anything about it,” says the chairwoman of the environmental committee in the state parliament. “The other, closely related, is that it does far too little to ensure that property developers and municipalities at least create the legally required ecological balance for all their construction projects.”
The head of the State Association for Bird Protection (LBV), Norbert Schäffer, grumbles: “The compensation areas are not far away, the regulations are often ignored.” The state government is also aware of the abuses. In 2017 – six years ago – the then Environment Minister and current Social Affairs Minister Ulrike Scharf (CSU) admitted that “implementation and control of compensation and replacement areas must become more efficient”. Little has happened since then. This was recently shown by a report by the Ministry of the Environment in the state parliament.
It is a complicated matter with the compensation areas or compensation measures, as they are called in official German. The basic idea is simple. According to the German and Bavarian nature conservation laws, compensation is due for every intervention in nature and the landscape. When a new residential or commercial area is built, a road or a power line, but also a solar park or a wind turbine, a replacement must be created for the landscape that is sacrificed – by creating a nutrient-poor grassland somewhere else, planting a hedge, a toad pond is excavated or a bog is renatured. The idea behind it is: Despite all the construction projects in the country, nature and landscape and thus the animal and plant world should remain as intact as possible. Lawyers speak of a ban on deterioration.
“A nature conservation law that only exists on paper does nothing for nature,” says Green politician Rosi Steinberger.
(Photo: Matthias Balk/picture alliance)
The need for compensation areas is gigantic. Because land use in Bavaria has been stagnating at a record level for years. In Bavaria, 10.3 hectares of free landscape are currently being converted into building land every day. Two farms, each with 36 hectares of arable land and pasture, are lost every week. Of course, the equalization should not and cannot happen on the same scale. Experts used to speak of a factor of 0.3. This meant that 0.3 hectares of compensation should be created for every hectare of free landscape that is built on. In the meantime, the factor has been replaced by a complex point system. It is intended to assess the quality of each offset. The only problem is that far too few compensation areas are being created. And even of those that are set up, only a fraction serve their purpose.
Wherever compensation areas have been checked up to now, the results have been similarly devastating. This also applies to the only official study from 2017. At that time, the State Office for the Environment (LfU) recorded and evaluated one hundred compensation areas in the Upper Bavarian district of Ebersberg. Only 20 percent met all requirements. 29 percent had minor defects, 24 percent larger ones. And at 26 percent “no implementation of the measures was recognizable”, as the study says. “It can’t be that only every fifth compensation area fulfills its purpose,” complained Christian Magerl, a member of the Greens’ state parliament, at the time. “No one needs to be surprised about the loss of species.”
“It’s all about not losing more nature,” says LBV boss Norbert Schäffer.
(Photo: Manfred Neubauer)
Magerl left the state parliament five years ago. But all investigations since then confirm the LfU study. The LBV has been trying to get a Bavaria-wide overview for three years. “No matter which district we look at, it’s always the same,” says association chief Schäffer. “About a quarter of the compensation areas do not exist, 50 percent have more or less deficits, and only the remaining quarter is such that we can say: yes, that fits and meets the requirements.”
The reasons for the grievances are always the same: planners, investors, authorities and politicians find the effort involved in compensating areas far too high. Because they don’t just have to be procured and prepared. They also need to be looked after. Otherwise, the ecological effect that nature conservationists expect from them will not materialize. All of this costs money and personnel, which many communities prefer to invest elsewhere. The farmers are bothered by the fact that they are sometimes supposed to give up valuable farmland or pasture land for nature conservation. Above all, as Steinberger and Schäffer criticize, there is a lack of controls. The lower nature conservation authorities at the district offices have so many other tasks that they could not also fulfill them – even if they wanted to.
Best practice collections and guidelines for action
There have been serious doubts about this for years. And the state government’s report to the state parliament was not able to dispel them. In their presentation, the representatives of the environment and building ministries spoke primarily of best practice collections and guidelines for action. In addition, the digital eco-area cadastre has been restructured and simplified so that the municipalities can now enter the compensation areas in their corridors with the least possible effort. So far, a Bavaria-wide overview of the compensation areas has failed because no one can say exactly how many there should be and how many there actually are. This should now be possible thanks to the new eco-area cadastre.
These measures are not enough for the Greens and the LBV. “A nature conservation law that only exists on paper does nothing for nature,” says Steinberger. “The state government must ensure that the compensation and replacement measures are implemented as required by law.” From their point of view, this also includes effective controls. LBV boss Schäffer argues similarly. “Investors, planners and politicians must realize that the compensation areas are not about doing something additional for nature conservation,” he says. “It’s just that we don’t lose more nature through their projects than we’ve already lost.”