Background
In 1970, satellite pictures showed a dark green belt of old-growth forest on the Finnish-Russian border. In the early 1980s, biologists discovered that the inner German border zone between Bavaria in the west and Thuringia in the east was a refuge for several rare bird species that had disappeared from the intensely used areas covering most of Central Europe. The reasoning behind this observation was that negative human impact on the environment is smaller in such border zones, because they are closed to public access and thus comparatively rarely disturbed by human activities.
After the end of the cold war in the late 1980s, the strict border regimes were abandoned and the border zones gradually opened, starting with the German reunification in 1990 and continuing with the step-by-step integration of new member states in to the Schengen Treaty as part of the enlargement process of the European Union. At the same time, large military facilities such as training grounds and military research establishments in or close to the border zones were closed down. For most cases, it was unclear whom the property of these lands belonged to and thus what the fate of the valuable landscapes would be. Against this background, the conservation initiative Green Belt formed to conserve the natural assets along the former Iron Curtain.
Read more about this topic: European Green Belt
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