(de-news.net) – Wildfires, extreme heat and drought are intensifying pressure on Germany and Belgium, prompting debates over emergency response, tenant protections, urban cooling, forest management and climate adaptation. Officials and experts broadly emphasize the growing need for resilient infrastructure and ecosystems.
Although authorities have not yet declared the situation completely under control, firefighters have succeeded in containing a significant wildfire in Belgium’s Hohes Venn nature reserve near the German border. The progress has reduced the immediate spread of the blaze, but the continuing presence of numerous hotspots means that suppression efforts remain necessary. Hosmans, the provincial crisis communications director, said the remaining fires were being addressed both from the ground and by aircraft.
In Monschau, North Rhine-Westphalia, residents who had been evacuated were allowed to return after local authorities lifted the evacuation order. About 30 people had fled their homes Sunday as the advancing fire approached the city. Authorities in two Belgian communities likewise revoked evacuation orders as conditions improved. The Hohes Venn blaze has burned about 3,000 hectares of Belgium’s most important nature reserve, making it one of the largest wildfires in the country’s history and underscoring the scale of the current fire threat.
Meanwhile, the German Tenants’ Association has welcomed Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig’s (SPD) initiative to make it easier for tenants to install air conditioning systems and outdoor sunshades. The association argues that residents need dependable legal protections when apartments remain dangerously hot for extended periods during summer. It is therefore calling for the proposal to be translated quickly into statutory rights and for heat protection to receive greater weight in tenancy law.
The Haus und Grund property owners’ association, by contrast, argues that existing options should be fully used before new legal entitlements are created. Portable air conditioners can generally already be operated without landlords’ permission, it said, while structural modifications can be addressed through individual agreements. From the association’s perspective, early discussions between tenants and landlords would allow the parties to identify measures suited to the characteristics and limitations of individual buildings.
The association also cautioned that additional statutory claims could encounter restrictions stemming from heritage protection, neighborhood preservation regulations or condominium association decisions. Such obstacles, it argued, could raise expectations among tenants while creating greater uncertainty for property owners about what measures can ultimately be implemented. The debate is unfolding as climate change makes heat waves more frequent and severe, with continued greenhouse gas emissions from coal, oil and gas further intensifying the warming trend.
Stefan Grundei, managing director of the Federal Association of German Allotment Garden Associations, has on his part called on the Federal Government to strengthen financial support for allotment gardens and allocate funding for them in the upcoming budget. He argues that these gardens should be regarded not simply as recreational spaces but as part of urban infrastructure because they support biodiversity, climate protection, recreation and heat mitigation. Their cooling effect can be particularly significant because allotments are regularly irrigated, potentially allowing them to provide greater cooling than conventional parks.
Grundei has also called for the revival of a federal funding program that had previously been planned. Such a program, he said, could help ensure that the overall area devoted to allotments does not shrink while encouraging more efficient use of land that is already available. A proposed program was removed from the federal budgets for 2025 and 2026 shortly before approval, leaving the sector without the planned funding mechanism.
The association estimates that Germany has about 1.2 million allotment plots, but demand substantially exceeds the available supply. Berlin alone is believed to need another 50,000 plots in addition to its existing 64,000. At the same time, the amount of land available for allotments is declining, creating a structural imbalance between demand and supply. The federal cabinet is scheduled to discuss heat and climate protection at its retreat next week, while budget negotiations in Parliament are due to begin in early September. SPD parliamentary executive Dirk Wiese has suggested that expanding allotment gardens could provide another means of creating urban refuges during periods of extreme heat.
Experts warn of escalating heat, drought, and wildfire threats
In a separate development, Author and forester Peter Wohlleben has urged authorities to leave forests damaged by wildfire largely undisturbed, arguing that natural regeneration can proceed without immediate intervention. He has warned against mechanically leveling or clearing burned areas because such operations can compact the soil, remove remaining humus and leave the terrain even more exposed to heat and drought. About 3,000 hectares in the Hohes Venn and 300 hectares in the Hürtgenwald burned in August, highlighting the extent of the damage across the affected landscapes.
Wohlleben argues that neither area necessarily needs to be immediately reforested and that natural regeneration could produce young trees in the Hürtgenwald within one or two years. If planting ultimately becomes necessary, he favors native deciduous forests. In his assessment, large-scale crown fires are uncommon in intact native deciduous woodland and are more often associated with cleared land or non-native conifers. Replanting species such as Douglas fir, pine or spruce, he cautioned, could reproduce conditions that contribute to future wildfire risk. Wohlleben trained as a forester and has written several books on trees and forest ecosystems. His book ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ was adapted into a film released in 2020.
A clear causal relationship between wildfires and climate change remains difficult to establish in many regions because reliable fire records are limited and other factors, including arson and forest management, also influence wildfire patterns. There is nevertheless a broader trend: fire-weather conditions have increased across all continents. In southern Europe, northern Eurasia, the United States and Australia, rising global temperatures are clearly associated with a higher probability of wildfires and an increase in the total area burned. The underlying warming trend will continue as long as fossil fuels are burned and additional greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere.
In turn, former Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) believes heat-related mortality in Germany is probably higher than official estimates indicate. He considers the Robert Koch Institute’s methodology relatively conservative but nevertheless defensible because it consistently captures changes in mortality rates. The difficulty lies partly in the indirect nature of heat-related deaths. Heat is often not recorded as the immediate cause of death even when it contributes significantly to a fatal medical event. Cardiovascular stress, for example, can help trigger a stroke that might otherwise not have occurred, while the death is formally attributed to the stroke itself.
Lauterbach has also supported a constitutional amendment aimed at strengthening heat protection, arguing that many local governments lack the financial resources required to implement effective measures. He has urged the CDU and CSU to reconsider political objections when protecting public health and preventing deaths are at stake. According to the RKI, heat waves have been associated with about 12,500 deaths in Germany so far this year, illustrating the scale of the public-health challenge posed by prolonged periods of extreme heat.
Climate researcher Mojib Latif similarly argues that many of the extreme weather events Germany is experiencing would be unlikely to occur in their current form without human-caused climate change. He has described the current summer as exceptional because numerous records have already been broken, pointing in particular to the increasing occurrence of temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius. At the same time, Latif emphasizes that the combination of extreme heat, low water levels and wildfires should not be viewed as a one-time anomaly. Instead, he sees the events as part of a longer-term development associated with a changing climate.
Latif also states that the economic costs of inadequate climate action are likely to exceed the expense of mitigation. Persistent drought, he says, is placing forests under severe and sustained stress, creating a new phase of forest decline that differs from the acid-rain crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. The central challenge has therefore shifted toward adapting forests to prolonged heat and water shortages. As the risks from heat, drought and wildfire continue to rise, Latif says, forests will need to be converted over the long term toward greater resilience.
