Europe's largest environmental award recognizes research into the role of deforestation in global warming, as Michael Gross reports.

The year 2006 might go down in history as the time when concern about global warming finally reached the political mainstream. Throughout the industrialized world, politicians of all colours have acknowledged the problem and expressed good intentions to do something about it, even if many of them are not quite ready to give up their ambitions to build new airport runways as yet.

Therefore, it seems fitting that the DBU (Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt — Federal Foundation for the Environment) has rewarded a biogeochemist who has spent decades investigating the role of forests in climate change.

The foundation, which was set up in 1991, handed out the German Environment Award for the 14th time this year. Worth 500,000 Euros, it is the largest such prize in Europe. Previous winners include film-maker Heinz Sielmann, who died earlier this year, and Paul Crutzen, who unraveled the mechanisms of ozone loss in the stratosphere. This year, the award was shared equally between biogeochemist Detlef Schulze from the Max-Planck Institute at Jena, and entrepreneur Hans Huber, who developed and distributed robust technologies for cleaning up drinking water in developing countries.