Eyes closed, corners of mouth raised, hands slapped in relief in front of face: Greta Thunberg has rarely been seen as happy as she was on Thursday. After weeks of tug-of-war, EU parliamentarians voted in favor of the renaturation bill. It is a central project of the Green Deal, proclaimed by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (EPP).
Hours before the vote, even experienced parliamentarians did not dare to bet on the result. Von der Leyen’s own EVP party colleagues, including the ÖVP, mobilized along with right-wing factions against the project: it threatened security of supply. On Thursday, however, the Social Democrats, Greens and parts of the Liberals and individual EPP MPs voted in favour.
The aim of the “Nature Restoration Act”: forests should be wild again, marshes moist and meadows more colorful. Rivers must be allowed to flow more freely (here you can see a project on the Danube). By 2030, at least one-fifth of damaged ecosystems in the EU must be restored, and by 2050, the entire EU must be ecologically balanced again. This is intended to protect European rollers, hamsters and wild bees, slow down species extinction and global warming and prevent floods.
After the vote, EPP chief Manfred Weber said that the next few years would not be about climate and environmental protection, but about “competitiveness and jobs”. And at a time when record heat, storms, heavy rains and landslides alternate and the climate crisis has a very clear impact on our daily lives and on prosperity.
Austrian Agriculture Minister Norbert Totschnig (ÖVP) also considers the law “excessive”. The EU Commission wants to go back to the state of 1953 when renaturing, you have to imagine that. When asked how far he wanted to go, he explained that he was looking “forward”. But does he really?
Agricultural representatives are right when they fear for soil fertility and ask for security of supply. But it is not the law of renaturalization that threatens them: it is climate change and the immense consumption of land.
Both threaten Europe’s soils, researchers said on Thursday at an event organized by the Discourse science network. For Austria, the Food Safety and Health Agency has long calculated that climate change would reduce yields by almost a quarter by 2050. In eastern Austria, with its important growing areas, they are said to have shrunk by nearly half. A 15% drop is expected for Europe as a whole, explained Martin Gerzabek, a soil expert at the Vienna University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences.
Russia, on the other hand, could expand its fertile land areas by half by 2065 due to permafrost thaw, and China by 30%. “One has to think about who will be in charge,” says Gerzabek.
The Restoration Act “is not about protecting nature, it’s a law very central to our survival,” said Franziska Tanneberger, head of the Greifswald Moor Center. As one of about 6,000 scientists, Tanneberger signed an open letter in favor of renaturation: it said that climate change and the loss of biodiversity were not a threat to Europe’s food security, but to environmental protection.
Take the example of swamps: although drained swamps make up only three percent of agricultural land, according to Tanneberger, they are responsible for a quarter of all agricultural emissions. It is not true that the areas to be renatured could no longer be used: the rewetted heaths, for example, can be used for paludiculture.
“We have to rethink agriculture”, says soil specialist Gerzabek. But that doesn’t mean that only farmers have to change something and everyone else sits back and relaxes. “More than half of the arable land in Austria is currently used for animal feed production,” warned Martin Schlatzer of the Research Institute for Organic Agriculture (FiBL). With less consumption of meat and other animal products, much less land would be needed. Schlatzer therefore proposes prices on the accompanying costs of animal products: they would be more expensive, but plant-based products would be cheaper.
But it is also clear that farmers must be given all the support they need to make the transition. Even Sebastian Lakner, professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of Rostock and one of the initiators of the open letter, admits that farmers currently see too much bureaucracy and too few rewards when trying to improve nature.
But parliamentarians have planned checks and balances: in case of extraordinary effects, the targets can be postponed. If there is not enough money, the commission must find a solution. First, however, Parliament has to finalize the regulation with member states anyway, and countries are then free to decide the precise structure.
Above all, Austria must also face its problem with the high level of land use, which deprives agriculture of some of the best arable land. In 2002, the federal government established a target to limit consumption to 2.5 hectares per day. In fact, more than eleven hectares continue to be lost every day: one of the biggest political failures of this country.
But the turquoise-green federal government failed to come up with a new soil protection strategy just three weeks ago. If the ÖVP fought land waste as much as it fought regrowth, it would really help farmers and food security.
Gerlinde Polsler
Every euro works – green bench made in Upper Austria
Gunskirchen has been Austria’s center since 2012 when it comes to sustainable investments and green banking: As a green bank, the environmental center of Raiffeisenbank Gunskirchen specializes in green investments, sustainable savings and green current accounts. Around 70 million euros were invested in more than 175 environmental projects.
Other information: www.umweltcenter.at
Heatwaves, floods and other natural disasters hit the elderly and sick, people with disabilities, women and children harder than others. Katharina Brunner, Emilia Garbsch and Katharina Kropshofer, among others, spoke to people who were there a year ago, when the creek burst its banks at the Carinthian meeting of Lake Ossiach and mudflows buried houses, some to the first floor.
On the other hand, you can see who is responsible for protecting people with disabilities in case of natural disasters in this documentary, where people with and without disabilities work together.
Following the publication of the FALTER story on the subject of hunting, numerous letters to the editor arrived, and the debate about what hunting in Austria achieves, should achieve and where a change of course might be needed continues to gather momentum.
On Monday, Ö1 and ZiB2 reported on Wednesday’s planned referendum on a federal hunting law in the Kleine Zeitung. Austria’s umbrella organization for hunting has launched a new campaign to “clear away anti-hunting prejudices”. Content-wise, however, official hunting representatives are still not on the same page.
While Salzburg provincial master hunter Max Mayr-Melnhof claims in Ö1 that problematic leadership is already prohibited, at least for shotgun shots (actually, this only applies to wet areas), his Austrian colleague Herbert Sieghartsleitner admitted to moth: “Yes, it’s a lead problem.”
In his “Tiergarten”, Peter Iwaniewicz writes this time about a species of crustacean that only occurs in the Danube valley, near Vienna, grows to a maximum size of two millimeters and was named “Kovalevskiella elisabethae”.
Like about 7,000 other species, it lives in groundwater. But even in this netherworld, the temperature has already risen by two degrees. Iwaniewicz hopes the little one lives up to the saying: “A true Viennese never dies!”
Soaking in cold water is the best thing to do these days. Marion and Nathalie Großschädl compiled a list of the most beautiful lakes and river pools in their book “Wildbadestätten”.