At a two-day conference at the end of the year, the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) will bring together the current state of knowledge on the impacts of climate change on cultural heritage as well as on protection and resilience measures. The conference, “Preserving Heritage, Securing the Future – New Pathways for Climate Adaptation,” to be held in Berlin on 8–9 December 2025, will place particular emphasis on the especially fragile historic gardens. The event will present (interim) results from projects funded by the DBU, including “Education in Historic Gardens” which is based at the Centre for Garden Art and Landscape Architecture at Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) and runs until 2026. Prof. Dr Inken Formann will refer to this project when speaking at the conference on the role of historic gardens as educational sites for sustainable development.
The programme will be opened by Prof. Dr Marion Ackermann, recently appointed President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, and Cornelia Soetbeer, Head of the Department for Environmental Communication, Cultural Property Protection and International Funding at the DBU. The keynote address will be delivered by Dr Hana Morel of King’s College London. She brings more than ten years of experience in cultural heritage, sustainability and policy, both in Germany and internationally, and has a particular interest in the contribution of culture and cultural heritage to addressing global challenges.
Climate change as a shared responsibility
According to Constanze Fuhrmann, who has implemented numerous garden-related projects together with the DBU, the conference is deliberately broad in scope, combining retrospectives and forward-looking perspectives. Its aims are to identify research gaps, develop approaches for addressing future challenges, and highlight successful implementations across different fields of action: “Climate adaptation for cultural heritage is a shared task for research, policy and practice. That is precisely why our event brings together stakeholders from all these areas, in order to develop concrete pathways for protecting our cultural heritage in the context of climate change.”
Prof. Dr Michael Rohde, currently a visiting scholar at LUH, will speak in the section “Historic Green Spaces: Dealing with Climatic Change.” Until the end of last year, Rohde served as Garden Director of the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg. Concerned about the sometimes dramatic damage observed in the UNESCO World Heritage parks, particularly in Potsdam, he initiated numerous measures to protect them. In his lecture, he will focus on the thematic field of “Pathways of Adaptation.”
Dramatic conditions and responses to pressing problems
The results of two DBU-funded projects will be presented by Prof. Dr Norbert Kühn of TU Berlin and Cord Panning, Director of the Fürst Pückler Park Foundation in Bad Muskau. Both speakers will contrast the sometimes alarming developments affecting green cultural heritage with model solutions that are transferable and worthy of emulation. Kühn will summarise the first nationwide study “Park Damage Report” and discuss the forward-looking strategies required to secure the long-term preservation of woody vegetation. The study also involved Hannover’s Stadtpark and the Hinüber Garden, which are managed by the city’s Department of Environment and Urban Green Spaces.
Another nationwide DBU project was “Climate Adaptation for Historic Gardens” (2022–2024). This initiative, which spans the various state palace administrations, will be illustrated by Panning using the German–Polish UNESCO World Heritage site of Fürst Pückler Park as an example. Numerous practical case studies—drawing on horticultural expertise developed in collaboration with specialists from neighbouring natural sciences—ultimately convey a sense of confidence: “We have identified the problems, and we are the right people to solve them.” During a student field excursion to the Muskauer Park (Park Mużakowski) in May of this year, project leader Holger Rothamel explained, among other measures, the replanting of autochthonous seedlings grown from the park’s own stocks into the stumps of lost mature trees.
Participation in the conference can be credited as a field excursion within the Landscape Architecture degree programme.
