From the point of view of Brandenburg’s Greens, a new natural disaster is inevitable in the Oder. “The river still carries high salt loads,” said Isabell Hiekel, a member of the state parliament, in Potsdam on Tuesday. “When it gets warmer, the living conditions for the toxic golden algae will improve again.” Last year, the occurrence of the algae led to mass fish deaths in the German-Polish border river. However, there were hardly any countermeasures.
“So far nothing has happened on the part of the Polish government,” said Hiekel. Together with Sarah Dahmus, member of the Frankfurt state parliament, she presented a catalog of demands with a total of eleven points for the protection of the Oder on Tuesday. In it, the Greens are in favor of stopping the development of the river and suspending the German-Polish Oder Agreement of 2015.
“It must be attributed to near-natural flood protection and low water-optimized shipping,” demanded Dahmus. Since the Polish government does not comply with the rule of law and the expansion of the Oder continues unabated despite a ruling to the contrary by the Polish Higher Administrative Court, its financing by the World Bank and the EU must also be stopped.
In the eleven-point plan, the Greens also advocate a reduction in saline discharges into the Oder to an “acceptable level”, a halt to expansion planning on the German side, a cross-border national park and a master plan for the environmentally friendly development and use of the Oder .
However, the representatives of the environmental party in the Potsdam state parliament also had to admit on Tuesday that they had few allies in Poland, which is governed by the national conservative party PiS: The Polish Greens only had four MPs in the Sejm, said Dahmus. But they too would do everything in their power to protect the Oder.
