BERLIN, Oct. 12 (Xinhua) -- The expert commission overseeing Germany's planned exit from coal power generation wants the federal government to offer affected mining areas generous assistance in their structural redevelopment, the newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) reported on Friday.
SZ cited a draft of a report by the "Growth, Structural change and Employment" Commission on how to manage and finance the phasing out of coal power which it had obtained. The final document is scheduled for presentation to the government in late October.
In the draft, the commission proposed an "areal bonus" for Germany's most affected regions when it came to the expansion of traffic and telecommunication infrastructure. Alongside the creation of research facilities and new government institutions, such structural development was urgently needed to lessen the blow to the material and career prospects of local populations.
The report marks the first time that details of the commissions' recommendations are published after a lengthy public debate over the future of coal in the eurozone's largest economy. In total, 27 cities and districts would benefit from the preferential regulatory treatment envisioned by the commission.
The latest "ARD DeutschlandTrend" poll suggests that an overwhelming majority of voters (84 percent) want Berlin to prioritize climate change in its treatment of the national coal industry. Plans by the energy company RWE to fell the Hambach forest in North Rhine-Westphalia as part of its regional coal mining activities have recently galvanized widely-publicized protests in the country with as many as 50,000 marching peacefully in the contested woodlands.
Aside from managing resulting structural change, one of the key objectives of the coal commission is to limit the extent to which Germany falls short of its own climate policy objectives. Not least due to Berlin's abrupt decision to gradually exit nuclear power in 2011, Germany continues to rely to a significant degree on highly-polluting coal to meet its national energy needs.
German Social Democrat (SPD) leader Andrea Nahles has recently warned against a hasty exit from national coal power generation in Germany without taking the impact on regional unemployment into account. Nahles' appeal echoed calls by the mining trade union IG Bergbau, Chemie and Energie (IG BCE) for legislators to soften the blow of the planned exit from coal power.
"The coal miners know that there is an expiry date on their profession," IG BCE president Michael Vassiliadis told Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa) earlier. He emphasized that large-scale investment was needed to make former German coal mining areas more attractive as locations for high value-added industrial manufacturing rather than low-skill, low-wage professions.
According to the draft seen by SZ on Friday, the coal commission mainly wants to tackle this issue with re-training programs for people working in the industry. The government's overarching goal should be to "preserve and expand the well-paid industrial jobs with their specific knowledge" in this context.
The commission further emphasized that the establishment of new companies or corporate headquarters in former coal mining areas could not be hampered by a lack of skilled labor. "The affected regions should become innovation regions which embark on entirely new paths," the draft report read.
