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Instrumental data show that the groundwater and lake levels in Northeast Germany have decreased over the past decades, and this process has accelerated over the past few years. In addition to global warming, the direct influence of humans on the local water balance is suspected to be the cause. Since the instrumental data usually go back only a few decades, little is known about the multidecadal to centennial-scale trend, which also takes long-term climate variation and the long-term influence by humans on the water balance into account. This study aims to quantitatively reconstruct the surface water areas in the Lower Havel Inner Delta and of adjacent Lake Gulpe in Brandenburg. The analysis includes the calculation of surface water areas from historical and modern maps from 1797 to 2020. The major finding is that surface water areas have decreased by approximately 30% since the pre-industrial period, with the decline being continuous. Our data show that the comprehensive measures in Lower Havel hydro-engineering correspond with groundwater lowering that started before recent global warming. Further, large-scale melioration measures with increasing water demands in the upstream wetlands beginning from the 1960s to the 1980s may have amplified the decline in downstream surface water areas.
Flood risk management in Germany follows an integrative approach in which both private households and businesses can make an important contribution to reducing flood damage by implementing property-level adaptation measures. While the flood adaptation behavior of private households has already been widely researched, comparatively less attention has been paid to the adaptation strategies of businesses. However, their ability to cope with flood risk plays an important role in the social and economic development of a flood-prone region. Therefore, using quantitative survey data, this study aims to identify different strategies and adaptation drivers of 557 businesses damaged by a riverine flood in 2013 and 104 businesses damaged by pluvial or flash floods between 2014 and 2017. Our results indicate that a low perceived self-efficacy may be an important factor that can reduce the motivation of businesses to adapt to flood risk. Furthermore, property-owners tended to act more proactively than tenants. In addition, high experience with previous flood events and low perceived response costs could strengthen proactive adaptation behavior. These findings should be considered in business-tailored risk communication.
Flood risk management in Germany follows an integrative approach in which both private households and businesses can make an important contribution to reducing flood damage by implementing property-level adaptation measures. While the flood adaptation behavior of private households has already been widely researched, comparatively less attention has been paid to the adaptation strategies of businesses. However, their ability to cope with flood risk plays an important role in the social and economic development of a flood-prone region. Therefore, using quantitative survey data, this study aims to identify different strategies and adaptation drivers of 557 businesses damaged by a riverine flood in 2013 and 104 businesses damaged by pluvial or flash floods between 2014 and 2017. Our results indicate that a low perceived self-efficacy may be an important factor that can reduce the motivation of businesses to adapt to flood risk. Furthermore, property-owners tended to act more proactively than tenants. In addition, high experience with previous flood events and low perceived response costs could strengthen proactive adaptation behavior. These findings should be considered in business-tailored risk communication.
Putting the plan into practice implementation of proposals for measures of local landscape plans
(2012)
The knowledge of the effectiveness of local landscape planning in Germany is in the main limited to particular cases and derives mostly from qualitative single case studies. This applies especially to the implementation of measures defined by landscape plans. To fill that gap, the paper focuses on the implementation of those measures. Furthermore, it discusses the factors and framework conditions which are crucial for this implementation. The potential factors and conditions of influence were derived from theory and compiled in 20 investigation hypotheses. In order to gain information on the execution of the measures, 28 randomly selected plans were first analysed, then interviews were carried out with administration representatives. It can be stated that landscape planning has positively influenced the development of nature and landscape in the investigated municipalities. A considerable number of measures had been implemented, although landscape planning as a supply-side instrument proposes generally a very large number of measures. Factors with a positive effect on the implementation of landscape planning measures are pointed out.
Large-scale crop yield failures are increasingly associated with food price spikes and food insecurity and are a large source of income risk for farmers. While the evidence linking extreme weather to yield failures is clear, consensus on the broader set of weather drivers and conditions responsible for recent yield failures is lacking. We investigate this for the case of four major crops in Germany over the past 20 years using a combination of machine learning and process-based modelling. Our results confirm that years associated with widespread yield failures across crops were generally associated with severe drought, such as in 2018 and to a lesser extent 2003. However, for years with more localized yield failures and large differences in spatial patterns of yield failures between crops, no single driver or combination of drivers was identified. Relatively large residuals of unexplained variation likely indicate the importance of non-weather related factors, such as management (pest, weed and nutrient management and possible interactions with weather) explaining yield failures. Models to inform adaptation planning at farm, market or policy levels are here suggested to require consideration of cumulative resource capture and use, as well as effects of extreme events, the latter largely missing in process-based models. However, increasingly novel combinations of weather events under climate change may limit the extent to which data driven methods can replace process-based models in risk assessments.
Flood damage estimation is a core task in flood risk assessments and requires reliable flood loss models. Identifying the driving factors of flood loss at residential buildings and gaining insight into their relations is important to improve our understanding of flood damage processes. For that purpose, we learn probabilistic graphical models, which capture and illustrate (in-)dependencies between the considered variables. The models are learned based on postevent surveys with flood-affected residents after six flood events, which occurred in Germany between 2002 and 2013. Besides the sustained building damage, the survey data contain information about flooding parameters, early warning and emergency measures, property-level mitigation measures and preparedness, socioeconomic characteristics of the household, and building characteristics. The analysis considers the entire data set with a total of 4,468 cases as well as subsets of the data set partitioned into single flood events and flood types: river floods, levee breaches, surface water flooding, and groundwater floods, to reveal differences in the damaging processes. The learned networks suggest that the flood loss ratio of residential buildings is directly influenced by hydrological and hydraulic aspects as well as by building characteristics and property-level mitigation measures. The study demonstrates also that for different flood events and process types the building damage is influenced by varying factors. This suggests that flood damage models need to be capable of reproducing these differences for spatial and temporal model transfers.
In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to allow over a million asylum seekers to cross the border into Germany. One key concern was that her decision would signal an open-door policy to aspiring migrants worldwide – thus further increasing migration to Germany and making the country permanently more attractive to irregular and humanitarian migrants. This ‘pull-effect’ hypothesis has been a mainstay of policy discussions ever since. With the continued global rise in forced displacement, not appearing welcoming to migrants has become a guiding principle for the asylum policy of many large receiving countries. In this article, we exploit the unique case study that Merkel's 2015 decision provides for answering the fundamental question of whether welcoming migration policies have sustained effects on migration towards destination countries. We analyze an extensive range of data on migration inflows, migration aspirations and online search interest between 2000 and 2020. The results reject the ‘pull effect’ hypothesis while reaffirming states’ capacity to adapt to changing contexts and regulate migration.
A new challenger seeks to enter the German party system: Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). With her new party, former Die Linke politician Sahra Wagenknecht combines a left-authoritarian profile (economically left-leaning, but culturally conservative) with anti-US, pro-Russia and anti-elitist stances. This article provides the first large-n academic study of the voter potential of this new party by using a quasi-representative sample (n = 6,000) drawn from a Voting Advice Application-like dataset that comes from a website designed to explore the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht’s positions. The results show that congruence with foreign policy positions and anti-elitism are strong predictors of the propensity to vote for the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. In contrast, social/welfare and immigration policies are less predictive for assessing the party’s potential. Among the different socio-demographic groups, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht has a strong potential among baby boomers, the less educated and East Germans. Regarding party voters, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht is favoured by supporters of some minor parties like dieBasis, Freie Wähler and Die PARTEI, but also non-voters. Among the established parties, the party’s potential is high among Die Linke voters and, to a lesser extent, voters of the Social democrats (SPD) and Alternative for Germany (AfD). A potential below the average is reported for the supporters of the Liberals (FDP) and Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and most clearly for Green and Volt voters.
Germany’s relatively stable party system faces a new left-authoritarian challenger: Sahra Wagenknecht’s Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) party. First polls indicate that for the BSW, election results above 10% are within reach. While Wagenknecht’s positions in economic and cultural terms have already been discussed, this article elaborates on another highly relevant feature of Wagenknecht, namely her populist communication. Exploring Wagenknecht’s and BSW’s populist appeal helps us to understand why the party is said to also have potential among seemingly different voter groups coming from the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and far left Die Linke, which share high levels of populist attitudes. To analyse the role that populist communication plays for Wagenknecht and the BSW, this article combines quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative analysis covers all speeches (10,000) and press releases (19,000) published by Die Linke members of Parliament (MPs; 2005–2023). The results show that Wagenknecht is the (former) Die Linke MP with the highest share of populist communication. Furthermore, she was also able to convince a group of populist MPs to join the BSW. The article closes with a qualitative analysis of BSW’s manifesto that reveals how populist framing plays a major role in this document, in which the political and economic elites are accused of working against the interest of “the majority”. Based on this analysis, the classification of the BSW as a populist party seems to be appropriate.
Based on large representative German household survey data, we compare incomes of the self-employed with those of paid employees. We find that the entrepreneurial income gap is largest for those holding a tertiary degree, but in two directions: positive for employers (self-employed with further employees) and negative for solo entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs holding a tertiary degree also face the greatest income variation. However, some solo self-employed earn more than their employed counterparts, in particular those with a university entrance degree as the highest level of education.
We revisit the concept of Diversified Quality Production (DQP), which we introduced about 30 years ago. Our purpose is to examine the extent to which the concept can still be considered tenable for describing and explaining the development of the interaction between the political economy and concepts of production, notably in Germany. First, we show why and in which ways DQP was more heterogeneous than we had originally understood. Then, on the basis of evidence with respect to political, business, and economic changes in Germany, we show that DQP Mark I, a regime by and large characteristic of the 1980s, turned into DQP Mark II. In the process, major ‘complementarities’ disappeared between the late 1980s and now—mainly the complementarity between production modes on the one hand and industrial relations and economic regulation on the other. While the latter exhibit greater change, business strategies and production organization show more continuity, which helps explain how Germany maintained economic performance after the mid-2000s, more than other countries in Europe. Conceptually, our most important result is that the complementarities emphasized in political economy are historically relative and limited, so that they should not be postulated as stable configurations.
Understanding and quantifying total economic impacts of flood events is essential for flood risk management and adaptation planning. Yet, detailed estimations of joint direct and indirect flood-induced economic impacts are rare. In this study an innovative modeling procedure for the joint assessment of short-term direct and indirect economic flood impacts is introduced. The procedure is applied to 19 economic sectors in eight federal states of Germany after the flood events in 2013. The assessment of the direct economic impacts is object-based and considers uncertainties associated with the hazard, the exposed objects and their vulnerability. The direct economic impacts are then coupled to a supply-side Input-Output-Model to estimate the indirect economic impacts. The procedure provides distributions of direct and indirect economic impacts which capture the associated uncertainties. The distributions of the direct economic impacts in the federal states are plausible when compared to reported values. The ratio between indirect and direct economic impacts shows that the sectors Manufacturing, Financial and Insurance activities suffered the most from indirect economic impacts. These ratios also indicate that indirect economic impacts can be almost as high as direct economic impacts. They differ strongly between the economic sectors indicating that the application of a single factor as a proxy for the indirect impacts of all economic sectors is not appropriate.
Firms engage in forecasting and foresight activities to predict the future or explore possible future states of the business environment in order to pre-empt and shape it (corporate foresight). Similarly, the dynamic capabilities approach addresses relevant firm capabilities to adapt to fast change in an environment that threatens a firm’s competitiveness and survival. However, despite these conceptual similarities, their relationship remains opaque. To close this gap, we conduct qualitative interviews with foresight experts as an exploratory study. Our results show that foresight and dynamic capabilities aim at an organizational renewal to meet future challenges. Foresight can be regarded as a specific activity that corresponds with the sensing process of dynamic capabilities. The experts disagree about the relationship between foresight and sensing and see no direct links with transformation. However, foresight can better inform post-sensing activities and, therefore, indirectly contribute to the adequate reconfiguration of the resource base, an increased innovativeness, and firm performance.
Spatially explicit knowledge on grassland extent and management is critical to understand and monitor the impact of grassland use intensity on ecosystem services and biodiversity. While regional studies allow detailed insights into land use and ecosystem service interactions, information on a national scale can aid biodiversity assessments. However, for most European countries this information is not yet widely available. We used an analysis-ready-data cube that contains dense time series of co-registered Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 data, covering the extent of Germany. We propose an algorithm that detects mowing events in the time series based on residuals from an assumed undisturbed phenology, as an indicator of grassland use intensity. A self-adaptive ruleset enabled to account for regional variations in land surface phenology and non-stationary time series on a pixelbasis. We mapped mowing events for the years from 2017 to 2020 for permanent grassland areas in Germany. The results were validated on a pixel level in four of the main natural regions in Germany based on reported mowing events for a total of 92 (2018) and 78 (2019) grassland parcels. Results for 2020 were evaluated with combined time series of Landsat, Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope data. The mean absolute percentage error between detected and reported mowing events was on average 40% (2018), 36% (2019) and 35% (2020). Mowing events were on average detected 11 days (2018), 7 days (2019) and 6 days (2020) after the reported mowing. Performance measures varied between the different regions of Germany, and lower accuracies were found in areas that are revisited less frequently by Sentinel-2. Thus, we assessed the influence of data availability and found that the detection of mowing events was less influenced by data availability when at least 16 cloud-free observations were available in the grassland season. Still, the distribution of available observations throughout the season appeared to be critical. On a national scale our results revealed overall higher shares of less intensively mown grasslands and smaller shares of highly intensively managed grasslands. Hotspots of the latter were identified in the alpine foreland in Southern Germany as well as in the lowlands in the Northwest of Germany. While these patterns were stable throughout the years, the results revealed a tendency to lower management intensity in the extremely dry year 2018. Our results emphasize the ability of the approach to map the intensity of grassland management throughout large areas despite variations in data availability and environmental conditions.
Models for the predictions of monetary losses from floods mainly blend data deemed to represent a single flood type and region. Moreover, these approaches largely ignore indicators of preparedness and how predictors may vary between regions and events, challenging the transferability of flood loss models. We use a flood loss database of 1812 German flood-affected households to explore how Bayesian multilevel models can estimate normalised flood damage stratified by event, region, or flood process type. Multilevel models acknowledge natural groups in the data and allow each group to learn from others. We obtain posterior estimates that differ between flood types, with credibly varying influences of water depth, contamination, duration, implementation of property-level precautionary measures, insurance, and previous flood experience; these influences overlap across most events or regions, however. We infer that the underlying damaging processes of distinct flood types deserve further attention. Each reported flood loss and affected region involved mixed flood types, likely explaining the uncertainty in the coefficients. Our results emphasise the need to consider flood types as an important step towards applying flood loss models elsewhere. We argue that failing to do so may unduly generalise the model and systematically bias loss estimations from empirical data.
Rabbit associated genotype 3 hepatitis E virus (HEV) strains were detected in feral, pet and farm rabbits in different parts of the world since 2009 and recently also in human patients. Here, we report a serological and molecular survey on 72 feral rabbits, collected along a rural-urban transect in and next to Frankfurt am Main, Central Germany. ELISA investigations revealed in 25 of 72 (34.7%) animals HEV-specific antibodies. HEV derived RNA was detected in 18 of 72 (25%) animals by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction assay. The complete genomes from two rabbitHEV-strains, one from a rural site and the other from an inner-city area, were generated by a combination of high-throughput sequencing, a primer walking approach and 5′- and 3′- rapid amplification of cDNA ends. Phylogenetic analysis of open reading frame (ORF)1-derived partial and complete ORF1/ORF2 concatenated coding sequences indicated their similarity to rabbit-associated HEV strains. The partial sequences revealed one cluster of closely-related rabbitHEV sequences from the urban trapping sites that is well separated from several clusters representing rabbitHEV sequences from rural trapping sites. The complete genome sequences of the two novel strains indicated similarities of 75.6–86.4% to the other 17 rabbitHEV sequences; the amino acid sequence identity of the concatenated ORF1/ORF2-encoded proteins reached 89.0–93.1%. The detection of rabbitHEV in an inner-city area with a high human population density suggests a high risk of potential human infection with the zoonotic rabbitHEV, either by direct or indirect contact with infected animals. Therefore, future investigations on the occurrence and frequency of human infections with rabbitHEV are warranted in populations with different contact to rabbits.
An increase in zoonotic infections in humans in recent years has led to a high level of public interest. However, the extent of infestation of free-living small mammals with pathogens and especially parasites is not well understood. This pilot study was carried out within the framework of the "Rodent-borne pathogens" network to identify zoonotic parasites in small mammals in Germany. From 2008 to 2009, 111 small mammals of 8 rodent and 5 insectivore species were collected. Feces and intestine samples from every mammal were examined microscopically for the presence of intestinal parasites by using Telemann concentration for worm eggs, Kinyoun staining for coccidia, and Heidenhain staining for other protozoa. Adult helminths were additionally stained with carmine acid for species determination. Eleven different helminth species, five coccidians, and three other protozoa species were detected. Simultaneous infection of one host by different helminths was common. Hymenolepis spp. (20.7%) were the most common zoonotic helminths in the investigated hosts. Coccidia, including Eimeria spp. (30.6%), Cryptosporidium spp. (17.1%), and Sarcocystis spp. (17.1%), were present in 40.5% of the feces samples of small mammals. Protozoa, such as Giardia spp. and amoebae, were rarely detected, most likely because of the repeated freeze-thawing of the samples during preparation. The zoonotic pathogens detected in this pilot study may be potentially transmitted to humans by drinking water, smear infection, and airborne transmission.
Bank voles can harbour Puumala virus (PUUV) and vole populations usually peak in years after beech mast. A beech mast occurred in 2014 and a predictive model indicates high vole abundance in 2015. This pattern is similar to the years 2009/2011 when beech mast occurred, bank voles multiplied and human PUUV infections increased a year later. Given similar environmental conditions in 2014/2015, increased risk of human PUUV infections in 2015 is likely. Risk management measures are recommended.
Strategic label
(2020)
The Afropolitan Berlin novel Biskaya by SchwarzRund (2016) is probably the first novel written in German which demonstratively wears this label – on the front cover of the book, the author announces it to be an Afropolitaner Berlin Roman underneath the title. While addressing quite a few particulars of the Berlin-Brandenburg area, the novel writes itself willingly into the globally popular, yet controversial realm of African inflected cosmopolitanism. In this essay, I will argue that the author uses the label strategically to negotiate the global and the local – or worldliness and cultural specificity – with the aim to increase the visibility of queer of Color critique in Germany.
SchwarzRund’s approach may seem contradictory at first: Even though she could have called her novel queer, neuro-diverse, diasporic or Black, she chose Afropolitan. While she wrote an outspokenly political novel, she labeled it with a term often critically denounced as apolitical. Using Afropolitanism, she seems to aim at a rather mainstream audience, but at the same time, she published with a small, activist publishing house. While attempting to tap into the transnational cultural and literary capital of Afropolitanism, the language of the book is German and restricts it to the German-speaking parts of the world.
This essay will explore the Afropolitanism depicted in Biskaya and elaborate on the strategic choice of label. I will offer one possible interpretation of the characters and settings which illustrate SchwarzRund’s vision and version of Afropolitanism. In my analyses, I am interested in political questions around the characters’ identities and the setting. The Black protagonists of the novel, Tue and Dwayne, live in Berlin, but grew up on the fictional island Biskaya. This island is located somewhere close to the European mainland and part of the continent; it had an entirely Black population until a destructive event forced many to move to the mainland. The protagonists, now living in a mainly white society, are depicted in a state of interrogation of their own sense of self, measuring oppressive societal norms against other possible ways of interaction. The novel shows how people are deemed strange and not fitting into a network of unspoken rules because of racialized bodies, sexual preferences and#shor lifestyle choices. However, SchwarzRund counters those structures of inequality with her characters’ playful ways to deal with queerness, femininity and blackness subverting imposed norms. The novel challenges imperatives of subordination, creates new visions and inscribes Black Germans as political subjects.
Anthropologists all over the world are discussing influences on individual height including quantity and quality of nutrition. To examine whether a relationship between nutritional components and height can be found this pilot study has been developed. The research samples consisted of 44 children (age 3–6 years) attending two different kindergartens in Germany. Height measurements were taken for each child. Furthermore the parents had to fill out a 24-hour questionnaire to document their children’s eating habits during the weekend. In order to standardize the measured height values z-scores were calculated with reference to the average height of the overall cohort. The results of correlation analysis indicate that height is not significantly related to any of the main nutritional components as protein (r = –0.148), carbohydrates (r = 0.126), fat (r = 0.107), fibre (r = –0.289), vitamin (r = 0.050), calcium (r = 0.110), potassium (r = 0.189) and overall calorie intake (r = 0.302). In conclusion, it can be stated that the quality of nutrition may not have a strong influence on individual height. However, due to the small sample size further research should be provided with a larger cohort of children to verify the present results.