THE MOOR THAT WE BURNED
An Adaptation Guide Tutorial: How We Created the Problem — and How We Start Fixing It
Our grandparents still heated their farms in the Emsland of northern Germany with peat, cut from nearby moors and dried into sods. During school holidays, some of us helped stack peat briquettes for the winter.
They burned well.
More than fifty years later, the High Fens between Belgium and Germany are burning. The name says it all: Hohes Venn means “high moor.” Much of what was once a saturated landscape is now dry. Beneath a thin layer of vegetation lies, in many places, tinder-dry peat.
And that is the adaptation lesson.
The landscape we inherited was not inevitable. We built it. We drained it, straightened it, paved it, heated it, cleared it and optimized it for production. Now we have to rebuild its ability to absorb shocks.
HOW DID IT START?
For generations, draining wetlands looked like progress.
Half of Europe's peatlands were drained and exploited. In the Emsland, our grandparents witnessed—and often welcomed—the transformation of what was then one of West Germany's poorest regions.
The Emsland Plan, adopted by the German Bundestag on May 5, 1950, brought development, infrastructure and agricultural modernization to the region.
One of its tools was the deep plough.
The objective was perfectly understandable:
Less swamp. Fewer mosquitoes and adders. More milk and potatoes.
The High Fens experienced similar interventions. People harvested peat, planted spruce and, eventually, left parts of the landscape dangerously dry.
At the time, these decisions made economic and social sense to many people.
They created farmland.
They created jobs.
They increased agricultural production.
They helped transform poor regions into prosperous ones.
What nobody fully understood was the price that would eventually come due.
WHAT DID WE DO?
We didn't create today's climate vulnerability with one catastrophic decision.
We accumulated it.
Step by step.
We drained wetlands.
We simplified forests.
We paved cities.
We built for cars.
We sealed the soil.
We industrialized agriculture.
We constructed buildings for a climate that was assumed to remain relatively predictable.
Each individual decision could look reasonable.
The combined result was anything but resilient.
OUR GRANDPARENTS WEREN'T THE VILLAINS
Our grandparents were not trying to destroy the climate.
They were trying to make a living.
They wanted warmer homes, productive farms, better roads, reliable food and a future for their children.
They were working with the knowledge, technology and economic priorities of their time.
That distinction matters.
Adaptation isn't about blaming previous generations for failing to know what we know today.
It's about refusing to repeat decisions that we now understand differently.
Yesterday's solution can become tomorrow's vulnerability.
And today's infrastructure is tomorrow's inheritance.
1. THE BIG ADAPTATION LESSON
My grandparents were climate sinners—but out of necessity and ignorance, not malice.
The Emsland Plan was adopted by the German Bundestag on May 5, 1950, helping transform the region and marking the destruction of one of Western Europe's great raised bog landscapes.
That distinction matters.
Adaptation isn't about blaming people in the past for failing to possess knowledge we have today.
It is about refusing to repeat decisions that we now understand differently.
Yesterday's solution can become tomorrow's vulnerability.
And today's infrastructure is tomorrow's inheritance.
2. HOW DO WE FIX IT?
There is no single climate adaptation switch.
There is no giant machine marked FIX CLIMATE.
There is something more practical:
Thousands of decisions that all point in the same direction.
And some of them can begin immediately.
STEP 1 — REWET THE MOORS
This is one of the clearest examples of adaptation doing several jobs simultaneously.
Restore the water.
Raise groundwater levels.
Block drainage channels.
Allow peatlands to become wetlands again.
Compensate farmers where agricultural land has to be taken out of conventional production.
The objective isn't simply to create nature reserves.
Wet peat doesn't burn like dry peat.
And healthy peatlands store carbon.
So rewetting can simultaneously provide:
- fire protection
- carbon storage
- biodiversity
- water retention
- landscape cooling
- greater resilience to drought
That's adaptation with multiple dividends.
STEP 2 — REBUILD THE FORESTS
Don't confuse planting trees with building resilient forests.
A forest designed primarily for rapid timber production is not necessarily the forest best equipped for a hotter, drier and more fire-prone climate.
The transition takes time.
Future mixed forests with greater proportions of deciduous species may be slower to establish than uniform spruce plantations.
That's inconvenient.
But climate adaptation is not a five-year landscaping project.
A forest is a multi-generational infrastructure project.
Plant for the climate your grandchildren will inherit—not simply the climate your grandparents knew.
STEP 3 — STOP BUILDING OVENS
Architecture has to adapt.
That means reconsidering excessive glass façades, enormous paved surfaces and buildings that depend on mechanical cooling to remain habitable.
Traditional building approaches from hotter climates offer useful lessons:
- shade
- shutters
- courtyards
- natural ventilation
- thermal mass
- smaller solar-exposed surfaces
- vegetation
- passive cooling
Air conditioning has a role.
But using air conditioning to compensate for fundamentally poor building design is adaptation by surrender.
The better strategy is to reduce the heat entering the building in the first place.
STEP 4 — DE-PAVE THE CITY
Here's one of the simplest interventions.
Take away the pavement.
Less asphalt.
Less concrete.
More trees.
More grass.
More soil.
More space for water.
More shade.
More room for people.
Cities can literally tear up surfaces that were previously considered permanent.
Germany's “Abpflastern” municipal competition demonstrates the principle: municipalities compete to remove sealed surfaces and create more space for vegetation and water.
And yes—the idea can start somewhere surprisingly small.
The schoolyard.
Break up the concrete.
Plant trees.
Create shaded areas.
Create places where rain can soak into the ground instead of rushing into overwhelmed drainage systems.
Give children a cooler place to play.
A tiny project can become a climate-adaptation classroom.
STEP 5 — GIVE WATER SOMEWHERE TO GO
A resilient city doesn't treat every drop of rain as waste that must immediately disappear down a drain.
It holds water.
Parks can temporarily store it.
Depressions in the landscape can collect it.
Trees can intercept it.
Soils can absorb it.
Wetlands can retain it.
Floodplains can flood.
The most resilient landscape isn't the one that prevents water from moving. It's the one that knows where the water can safely go.
STEP 6 — CHANGE THE INCENTIVES
Individuals cannot rebuild an entire landscape alone.
Government has to establish the framework.
That means:
- paying landowners to restore wetlands
- rewarding resilient forestry
- changing building standards
- financing urban greening
- supporting heat adaptation
- protecting floodplains
- making water retention economically worthwhile
- directing infrastructure investment toward long-term resilience
But policy is only half the equation.
Citizens still have to build it.
The forest owner.
The farmer.
The gardener.
The architect.
The urban planner.
The school principal.
The homeowner.
The municipality.
Everyone occupies a small piece of the adaptation puzzle.
7. HOW FAST CAN WE DO IT?
Here's the uncomfortable part.
We don't have decades to begin.
The restoration of the High Fens is a perfect illustration.
The destruction began roughly 400 years ago.
The reversal began only in 1992.
Initially, restoration targets involved roughly 25 hectares of additional wet peatland.
That sounds significant—until you put it beside the landscape burning today.
While these words were being written, 3,200 hectares of forest and peat were burning in the region.
That's the adaptation paradox:
Restoration is slow. Climate impacts are fast.
A forest can take decades to mature.
A peatland can take years or decades to recover.
A wildfire can destroy thousands of hectares in days.
Therefore:
We need restoration AND emergency adaptation.
Not one instead of the other.
8. THE ADAPTATION GUIDE: WHAT CAN WE DO NOW?
NEXT 30 DAYS
- Identify vulnerable areas around your home.
- Find out whether you live near flood-prone land, wildfire risk or urban heat islands.
- Create shade around buildings.
- Reduce unnecessary paved surfaces where possible.
- Improve rainwater infiltration.
- Check emergency water supplies.
- Learn your local wildfire, flood and extreme-heat procedures.
NEXT 1–3 YEARS
- Replace vulnerable landscaping with climate-resilient vegetation.
- Plant and protect mature shade trees.
- Support wetland restoration.
- Encourage schools to replace unnecessary pavement with green space.
- Push municipalities for urban cooling and water-retention projects.
- Support forestry practices designed for future climate conditions.
NEXT DECADE
- Restore wetlands at landscape scale.
- Transition forests toward resilient mixed ecosystems.
- Redesign cities around heat, water and people rather than cars alone.
- Retrofit buildings for passive cooling.
- Rebuild infrastructure for increasingly extreme weather.
- Make resilience a standard requirement—not an optional extra.
9. THE RULE OF ADAPTATION
The biggest mistake would be thinking that adaptation means doing one enormous thing.
It doesn't.
It means doing many things simultaneously.
Rewet the moor.
Restore the forest.
Cool the school.
Remove the asphalt.
Plant the tree.
Capture the rain.
Shade the building.
Protect the floodplain.
Change the building code.
Change the subsidy.
Change the street.
Change the assumption.
Again and again and again.
THE FINAL LESSON
My grandmother wasn't trying to destroy the climate.
She was trying to heat her house.
The farmers draining the Emsland weren't trying to create future wildfire hazards.
They were trying to grow food.
The architects building glass towers weren't trying to create urban heat traps.
They were building what their era considered modern.
That's precisely why adaptation matters.
We don't have to be villains to create vulnerability.
We simply have to make reasonable decisions based on yesterday's assumptions.
Now we know more.
So the job is not to punish the past.
The job is to redesign the future.
The fires in the High Fens demonstrate why this cannot be a leisurely process.
The time for a thousand small and large steps isn't someday.
It's now.
