Floods, fires and scorching heat: Climate change is causing problems for many people.
Federal President Steinmeier wants more efforts.
And sets an example for this in Darmstadt.
Darmstadt - Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for faster and more decisive action in climate protection when he was awarded the German Environment Prize.
Devastating rains in Central Europe as well as scorching heat and forest fires in the Mediterranean had also shown the last skeptics that climate change had arrived in Europe, Steinmeier said on Sunday at a ceremony in Darmstadt.
At the ceremony, he presented the prize, worth a total of 500,000 euros, to the Frankfurt scientist Katrin Böhning-Gaese and the Greifswald researcher Hans Joosten.
The award from the German Federal Environment Foundation (DBU) is one of the most highly endowed environmental awards in Europe.
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The pandemic and also the recent floods in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia made us feel how vulnerable we are, said Steinmeier.
“They made us understand that we have felt very secure, that we cannot go on as before.” The award winners would make it clear that we are not standing helplessly on the brink.
"There is no reason to freeze in fear and wait for the apocalypse."
Democratic politics must also turn to those who cannot easily keep pace with such a shift towards more climate protection. "Only if we distribute the costs and profits of the ecological conversion fairly, we will probably advance changes together," said the Federal President. But politicians are not the only ones who have to act now. More research is needed, laying the foundations for political debates, but which are also developing new technologies and applications.
The director of the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt, Böhning-Gaese, strives to predict environmental changes in ecosystems as precisely as possible over the next few decades, the foundation announced. The Greifswald scientist Joosten was honored for his decades of research on the importance of moors for climate protection. "Both raise awareness of what is necessary to preserve biological diversity and to stop global warming," said Steinmeier.
"Biodiversity is the basis of existence for us humans," said Böhning-Gaese.
The biodiversity is mainly due to the agricultural landscape.
More greening of conventional agriculture is needed here.
We need an agricultural turnaround.
According to the DBU General Secretary Alexander Bonde, around one million of around eight million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction.
“The moors are so important because they have immense carbon stocks,” said Joosten.
When a bog is drained, large quantities of the carbon dioxide responsible for climate change are released.
Almost all moors in Germany have already been drained.
His motto is: "The moor has to be wet and immediately." Dpa