Section:GDN 1N PaGe:25 Edition Date:190808 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/8/2019 19:06 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
Thursday 8 August 2019 The Guardian •
Up, up and away 25
Tourists ordered off
the Spanish Steps
Page 28Kashmir crisis
Pakistan to expel
India’s ambassador
Page 27
country’s meteorological offi ce. The
forests are close to collapse, said the
association of German foresters, BDF.
“The forest is the best way to save the
climate, but right now the forest itself
is a victim of the climate catastrophe,”
it added.
Forest makes up a third of Germany ,
11.4m hectares (28m acres), and about
half is privately owned.
The crisis is being keenly felt, not
least after a recent survey on national
identity in which 50 % of participants
cited forests as being central to their
idea of heimat , or sense of home.
Germans have for centuries had a
mythological, even spiritual, identi-
fi cation with their forests. Woodlands
have formed the inspiration for much
German music and literature –most
famously the 19th-century folk tales
of the Brothers Grimm. In every-
thing from Little Red Riding Hood to
Hansel and Gretel, above, the forest
is portrayed as a place of foreboding
and threat , as well as retreat, safety
and learning.
For German romanticists in the late
18th century, the forest was an impor-
tant symbol of unity and purity , the
word Waldeinsamkeit , forest loneli-
ness , embodying the sense of inner
peace to be found there. This was
later exploited by the Nazis, who pro-
moted the idea of the forest as a sign
of Germany’s cultural solidity and
encourag ed people to plant German
oaks to honour Adolf Hitler.
The tabloid Bild recently published
an ode to the German forest, calling it
“ part of the German soul ”.
“It is, alas, not some made-up
fairytale ... that our forest is in a state
of emergency ,” said the paper, “and if
we don’t do something to save it and
ourselves, we might end up with the
story: ‘Once upon a time, there was a
place called the German forest .’”
Solutions range from introducing
more robust tree species to naturally
allowing forests to adapt to the
conditions. The opposition Greens are
calling for a return to primeval forests –
wood s left to their own devices. While
the owners of private forests are tend-
ing towards planting Douglas fi rs and
northern red oaks, the Association for
Environmental and Nature Protection
in Germany, BUND , says such non-
native species pose an ecological risk.
The trees that are most under threat
are said to be spruce, beech, ash,
Norway maple and sycamore. T hose
most able to weather the climate crisis
are robinia, plane, and sweet and horse
chestnut trees.
Tanja Sanders, an expert in for-
est ecology who researches what
th ose of the future m ay look like,
said: “Forests are a vital part of our
lives. They form groundwater, give
us wood, fi lter the air, reduce CO 2
and the temperature and off er space
for species conservation and human
relaxation. But we must face up to
having to say goodbye to the forest as
we’ve known it.”▲ The forest has
been central to
German folklore,
including
the Brothers
Grimm’s Hansel
and Gretel The village of
Hohenschwangau
surrounded by
Bavarian woods
PHOTOGRAPHS: SEAN
PAVONE/ALAMY;
ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTYFiji attacks
‘selfi sh’ world
leaders as it
lays out climate
crisis blueprint
Kate LyonsFiji is to introduce one of the world’s
most ambitious legislative pro-
grammes to tackle the climate crisis,
and has labelled the global commu-
nity’s decision to set aside the call for
global heating to be capped at 1.5C
“grossly irresponsible and selfi sh”.
Announcing the climate change act
in Fiji’s parliament yesterday, the attor-
ney general and minister for economy
and climate change, Aiyaz Sayed-Khai-
yum , called global heating “a fi ght for
our lives and our livelihoods”.
He was speaking before the Pacifi c
Islands Forum (PIF) in neighbour-
ing Tuvalu next week, which will be
attended by leaders of Pacifi c coun-
tries including Fiji and Australia.
Fiji’s law will include tighter restric-
tions on plastics, a framework for Fiji
to reduce its emissions to net-zero by
2050, a carbon credits scheme, and
procedures to relocate communities
at risk from the climate crisis.
Frank Bainimarama , the prime min-
ister of Fiji, has regularly criticised
Australia for putting its economic
interests ahead of environmental
concerns and the wellbeing of neigh-
bouring Pacifi c countries, which are
on the frontline of the climate crisis.
Sayed-Khaiyum outlined the
impact the climate crisis was already
having around the world, including
Arctic ice melt , record high tempera-
tures, droughts, fl oods and wildfi res.
He described Fijians in the vast
Pacifi c, scanning “the horizon anx-
iously year by year for the kind of
extreme weather event that three
years ago took the lives of 44 of our
loved ones and infl icted damage equal
to one third of our GDP,” he said, in
reference to Cyclone Winston in 2016.
“[T]hat is the grave situation in
which we fi nd ourselves through no
fault of our own and why this govern-
ment puts such a strong emphasis on
the climate issue.”
He said the UN climate talks in Bonn
in May, during which Saudi Arabia
and other oil-producing nations were
accused of ignoring a report from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) urging action to keep
warming below 1.5C, was “a blow to
our hopes” and “grossly irresponsi-
ble and selfi sh”.
Fiji was the fi rst and is one of the
only governments in the world to com-
bine its econom ic and climate change
ministries, said Sayed-Khaiyum, who
holds both portfolios.
“We understand the relationship
between a strong economy and a stable
climate,” he said.▲ Germany’s agriculture minister, Julia Klöckner, pictured visiting Moritzburg,
near Dresden, has pledged €500m to a forest action plan PHOTOGRAPH: ALAMY‘Only if
everyone
unites will we
save forests
for ourselves
and future
generations’Julia Klöckner
Minister, up and away
urists ordered o
e Spanish Steps
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