A second consecutive year of unusually dry and warm weather has left swaths of dead and dying trees, fueling fears that the storied woods in more than a few of the fairytales by the Brothers Grimm could be heading for an unhappy end.
Officials say droughts, wildfires and hungry beetles destroyed 110,000 hectares of forest in Germany in 2018 and the damage this year could be even worse.
And while tackling climate change has broad public support across the political spectrum, the environmentalist Green party appears to be benefiting most, with the ZDF survey showing it would take 25% of the vote if there were a general election, more than doubling its result from 2017. The representative telephone poll of 1,307 voters conducted Aug. 6-8 had a margin of error of up to 3 percentage points.
The conservative governor of Bavaria recently proposed bringing forward the deadline for shutting down Germany's coal-fired power plants and suggested climate protection should be included in the country's constitution. Hambach Forest sits next to a massive open-cast lignite pit operated by utility giant RWE. An expert proposal to end the use of coal in Germany by 2038, approved by the government, was meant to save the forest, but activists say RWE is endangering what's left of the woods by pumping out precious groundwater.
Thunberg, who is planning to set sail next week for a U.N. climate summit in New York, in March dedicated an award she received from German media to"those protecting the Hambach Forest and the climate activists who fight to keep the fossil fuels in the ground everywhere."
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