A look back to the year 2015: The Federal Republic of Germany takes on almost one million refugees. And the DBU responds. Initiated by the DBU Board Chairperson and Parliamentary State Secretary in the Environmental Ministry, Rita Schwarzelühr-Sutter, the foundation sets up – quickly and with minimal bureaucracy – a special nationwide program called “The Environment and Refugees”. The DBU’s objective: to make an important contribution, through active environmental commitment, to the sustainable combating of the root causes of migration, and also to the integration of migrant persons and refugees in Germany.
Two years later, the DBU Department Head for Environmental Communication and Coordinator of the DBU Refugee Program, Dr. Ulrich Witte, sums it up thus: “As a fast reaction to the dramatic situation of the refugees, we spent 2.5 million euros on 55 projects across the entire country. And this program is working.”
Outstanding DBU Projects
In 2016 the project “Querbeet” of the organization “terre des hommes” and the gardening association “Deutsche Scholle” (Osnabrück) won first prize in the state of Lower Saxony’s “KinderHabenRechte” competition sponsored by the German Child Protection Agency (Deutscher Kinderschutzbund) and the Lower Saxony Social Ministry. In this project, five allotment gardening organizations offer opportunities for environmentally-friendly gardening, as well as intercultural exchange and casual contact, so that social relations can be developed and language competence nurtured.
The 2017 Integration Prize from the federal state of Sachsen-Anhalt was won by the Deutsches Fachwerkzentrum Quedlinburg e. V. for its project “Integrativer Ort BauDENKMAL”, in which refugees with talents in manual work and employees of the Fachwerkzentrum renovate historic buildings ecologically. The project was also recognized within the framework of the competition “Outstanding Locations in the Land of Ideas”, a joint competitiveness initiative of the federal government and the German business community.
The DBU has now supported some 20 refugee projects involving environmental education, including those designated as Projects of the UN Decade of Biological Diversity, which are activities of the "Barfuß-Verein" in Sprotta, and of the charitable organization Malteser Hilfsdienst with the German Alpine Association (Deutscher Alpenverein). An overview of this type of environmental education project in Germany is provided by the website www.umweltbildung-mit-fluechtlingen.de of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Natur- und Umweltbildung, ANU, which implements with DBU support an exemplary qualification program for specialists and multipliers in environmental education.
Scholarships for Refugees
As a complement to its regular scholarship program, the DBU has awarded 14 scholarships to young refugees who are college graduates, which are designed to improve their professional qualifications and help them acquire experience in environmental protection and conservation. In addition, the DBU welcomes the initiative by recipients of the Federal Cross of Merit Award, including numerous DBU representatives, to institute a study commission into “the causes of migration and flight”. In its own project work, too, the DBU will in the future address the subject of “causes of migration and flight”; for it is the view of the DBU that not only war and internal unrest, but also climate change, cause refugee movements. This underscores the significance of the “two-degree goal” formulated in the Paris Climate Accords.
