City of Berlin adopts citizen initiative to plant hundreds of thousands of trees

Berlin's city government will adopt a draft law proposed by a citizen initiative to plant hundreds of thousands of trees in the German capital by 2040. According to public broadcaster rbb, the city government run by the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), shelved plans to introduce its own bill for more green spaces and instead backed the draft from the citizen initiative “Baumentscheid” (tree referendum). The coalition parties said they could “not identify any need for major changes” to the citizen initiative’s draft, which will therefore be adopted “unchanged in its core parts”.  

The initiative’s co-founder, Heinrich Strößenreuther, said the organisation welcomed this “u-turn”. “We have the impression that something has indeed changed regarding the value of urban green spaces, nature in the city, trees and the tasks linked to them,” he said.

An analysis by Germany's statistical office found that green spaces on average contributed 0.9 degrees Celsius of cooling in Germany's cities in the summer of 2023. 

Environment senator Ute Bonde from the CDU recently signalled that the government was considering the initiative’s draft in its plans to make the capital more resilient to heatwaves, droughts, and heavy rains, rbb reported in a separate article. The senate initially rejected the draft estimated to costs over seven billion euros. Senator Bonde said that the aims might also be achieved with less money and also pointed at Germany's 500 billion euro special fund for infrastructure and climate neutrality as a possible funding vehicle, since the fund reserves one fifth of the sum for projects managed by Germany’s state governments.

The Baumentscheid initiative collected more than 33,000 signatures and met the required quorum to introduce a draft to improve the city’s climate adaptation efforts. It aims to bring the number of trees in Berlin to one million by 2040, meaning about 300,000 new trees must be planted by the end of the next decade. The initiative also calls for 1,000 so-called cooling islands to protect citizens during heatwaves, 100 new parks, 50 percent rainwater use for watering urban green spaces, and special measures for cooling areas of Berlin where heat stress is most pressing. Initially assuming the government would not adopt its draft, the initiative planned to launch a full public referendum alongside the city’s next elections in 2026.  

With Europe warming twice as fast as the global average, cities across the continent are pioneering efforts in withstanding deadly heatwaves, prolonged droughts and devastating floods. Urban resilience is on the rise, but even simple measures like planting more trees can prove harder to implement than expected.