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Short abstract:

Climate change is becoming tangible in Germany as severe forest diebacks occur. Researchers actively engage in heated public debates on future directions for forest management on opposing ends of the conflict. Here, we explore their motivations to enter the debate and the roles they take up in it.

Long abstract:

The effects of climate change have finally become undeniable in Germany: in the years 2018-2022 alone, 490.000 ha of forest cover (roughly 4.8% of Germany’s forests, or 1.3% of its entire surface area) has been lost due to droughts, wildfires or the related spread of pests. These events sparked fierce political and public debates on the causes, the culprits and the consequences, with forest researchers finding themselves on both sides of a controversy on the future design of Germany’s forest and its management.

By analyzing the researchers’ contribution in media and political advisory boards as well as interviews conducted with some of the most prominent participants, we explore the roles researchers play in the debate, and reconstruct patterns of becoming engaged. In this context, we claim that emotionally charged narratives, or “deep stories” (Hochschild, 2016), involving very specific imaginaries of human-forest relationships as well as of professional and sectoral identities, rather than surface-level disagreements over “facts”, play a crucial role in explaining the heated debate. It is those deep stories which in our case also motivated researchers to enter the public arena.

While public engagement by scientists in an era of multiple anthropogenic crises is often discussed in terms of raising awareness for long-term trends clearly visible in their data but easy to ignore in everyday life (“follow the science!”), here, the signs are obvious – but their interpretation is strongly contested also among researchers, and their struggle for epistemic authority on German forests is happening in broad daylight.