Protecting our green spaces

Red card for unrestrained building speculators!

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Harald Dostal)

For centuries, Austria's family farms - farmers, monasteries and aristocrats - have tended fields, meadows and forests! But a few large-scale industrial land speculators are raking in millions through rezoning and building development! All our valuable land is being lost.

"The dramatic sealing is not only visible in the form of gaping wounds in nature and hostile concrete deserts, but we are also experiencing it first hand - namely with an increase in natural disasters," warns Greenpeace boss Alexander Egit once again.

Politicians at federal, state and municipal level should be as ecologically clear as daylight: Healthy, humus-rich soils can absorb around five times their weight in water, while built-up or compacted areas prevent the infiltration of rainwater - which then often leads to torrential flooding during heavy rainfall events caused by climate change!

"We finally need binding limit values"
Greenpeace has long since put its demands to decision-makers on the table. "Effective soil protection requires fixed limit values. Otherwise, we run the risk of further and further fertile soils being concreted over, running out of agricultural land and numerous species losing their habitats," Egit explains. A limit value for soil consumption - namely to reduce this to 2.5 hectares per day throughout Austria by 2030 - was already set in 2002 in the federal government's sustainability strategy. The current government program also provides for such a reduction by 2030.

If we allow fertile soils to be used up, we will soon run out of space to produce food!

Alexander Egit, Greenpeace-Chef

However, Tyrol is the only federal state to have officially committed to complying with the Austria-wide 2.5 hectare limit. A Greenpeace survey also praises Vienna. The federal capital agrees to the Austria-wide limit value at least "in principle", while the Association of Municipalities continues to block it. Newly created living space is also a major driver of land consumption. Although, according to Greenpeace calculations, more than 17 million square meters of living space are vacant in Austria, companies earn money from the construction of 60,000 new apartments every year.

However, this is doubly damaging to our environment: not only is fertile agricultural land being built on, but building materials such as gravel, lime (for cement), sand etc. have to be extracted from nature on a large scale and then processed in complex technical processes. This makes it all the more important that existing buildings are renovated and unused sealed areas are redeveloped. The most important point, however, is that the rampant speculation of industrial companies and construction firms with all of our resources must be stopped - as our readers also demand by a large majority!

Major ÖVP donor earns 12 million euros with deal
Because otherwise - as the biggest eco-scandal of recent times in Ohlsdorf (Upper Austria) proves - all is lost. Ex-industrialist Hans Asamer acquired an area there from ASFINAG, the Austrian Federal Forestry Office and a private entrepreneur - an almost 19-hectare forest that he had cut down. After the land was rededicated, it was sold on to a Belgian company in 2022 at a mega profit. Negative forestry and environmental opinions were undermined by procedural tricks.

District authority waved forest clearance through 
The audit by the Court of Audit, which criticizes, among other things, the fact that ÖVP major donor Asamer made a profit of 12.2 million euros on his deal, can no longer change the fact that a green lung was destroyed forever.

It is also objected (far too late) that the destruction was waved through by the district authority! And without all the prescribed replacement reforestation areas having been determined. Egit: "This is an example of why the next government should put an end to this hustle and bustle by tightening up the law. Nature conservation must take precedence over the naked greed of individual millionaires."