Gibbach is a small, rural community with 900 inhabitants in the Upper Palatinate district of Amberg-Sulzbach. However, east of the community – in the direction of the much better known Hirschau – they have an extensive solar park along the railway line. As important as such a solar park is for the energy transition and climate protection, from a nature conservation point of view, such a project is considered to be an interference with nature and the landscape. And that’s why compensation has to be found for it. For the Gibbach solar park, two fields were to be converted into species-rich, natural meadows so that rare species of flowers and insects have an attractive habitat. And hedges should be created between the solar park and the adjacent fields. The problem is: there are neither the natural meadows nor the hedges. In many places in Bavaria it is the same as in Gibbach.
“It’s not far from the compensation areas, the legal requirements for them are systematically disregarded,” says the chairman of the state association for bird protection (LBV), Norbert Schäffer. “We do not want to accept that any longer. The specifications must finally be complied with.” The LBV therefore started a campaign a good six months ago. The aim is for the cities and municipalities, the builders and the Free State to finally fulfill their duty, according to which compensation must be created for every intervention in nature and the landscape.
The basic idea for the compensation measures, as the compensation areas are called in official German, is actually very simple. When a new residential or commercial area, a road or a power line is built, a replacement must be created for the landscape that is sacrificed for it – by creating a poor lawn elsewhere, planting a hedge, digging a toad pool or renaturing a bog. This is what the Nature Conservation Act says, this is what the so-called Bavarian Compensation Ordinance provides. The idea behind it is: In spite of all construction projects all over the country, nature and the landscape and thus the flora and fauna should remain intact as possible. Lawyers speak of a ban on deterioration.
The reality looks bitter, of course. In the past, studies have repeatedly shown that at most a quarter of all compensation areas in Bavaria deserve their name. Half of them achieve the goals that are aimed at more badly than well. And the remaining quarter simply doesn’t exist – like in Gibbach.
The LBV campaign confirms the findings once again. The need for compensation areas is gigantic. Because land consumption is at a record level. Currently, 10.8 hectares of open landscape are converted into building land every day in Bavaria. Two farms, each with 36 hectares of arable land and pasture land, are lost every week. Of course, the compensation does not have to be of the same order of magnitude. Experts used to speak of a factor of 0.3. This meant that for every hectare of open landscape that is built on, 0.3 hectares should be compensated. In the meantime, the compensation measures are calculated according to a complicated point system, although the order of magnitude itself is unlikely to have changed much.
There are many reasons for the deficits. The effort is often far too high for planners, authorities and municipalities. Because the compensation areas not only have to be procured and prepared, they also have to be looked after over the long term. All of this costs money and personnel, which builders and municipalities prefer to invest elsewhere. The farmers are bothered by the fact that they are sometimes supposed to give up valuable arable or pasture land for nature conservation. The lower nature conservation authorities, which are supposed to control the compensation areas, suffer from a shortage of personnel that they cannot really fulfill their duty. Years ago, the state government promised an improvement.
LBV boss Schäffer therefore demands that from now on really all municipalities report the compensation areas in their corridors to the Bavaria-wide ecological land register. “Because only then can we get a real overview of the actual situation,” he says. He also wants the builders to have to provide evidence of the implementation of the respective compensation measure. “And of course the nature conservation authorities need more staff,” says Schäffer. “How else can they check whether everything is correct outside on the land?” In addition, the environmental association demands that the ecological land register be made publicly available so that everyone can get all information about the compensation areas.
Especially since there are always positive examples. For example in the Lower Franconian town of Röttingen. In 2004 they built a new bypass in the wine town on the Tauber, which is well known for its summer Franconian Festival. To compensate for this, they should create new orchards, hedges, indigenous trees, grasslands and the like on an area of 3.6 hectares, which should be cultivated in a very natural way and without the use of pesticides. Although the groundbreaking for the Röttinger bypass road was almost exactly 17 years ago, all the compensation areas are still in place and, moreover, in top condition: when the LBV recently examined them, it encountered such special species as the green woodpecker, the mother-of-pearl butterfly , the field cricket and the Carthusian carnation.