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REFIRE’s report on the Wüest Partner/Climada climate-risk study above in this issue finds that up to 68% of German buildings could face high heat stress by 2050. (Read more about it here.) This summer has made that projection feel considerably less remote: the Robert Koch Institute’s statistical model estimates that around 14,000 deaths in Germany between early April and 9 August were heat-related.
Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig (SPD) told the Rheinische Post on 19 August that “traditional legal policy” also had a role to play in protecting people from heat. “I can imagine, for example, that we could make it easier for tenants to fit their flats with air-conditioning units or sun blinds,” she said.
More than half of German households rent, but tenants have no general right to install fixed air-conditioning systems or external blinds without their landlord’s consent. Both normally alter the building, unlike portable indoor cooling units. Hubig said any reform would therefore need “clear and workable regulations for both sides”.
Nothing concrete has yet emerged. The Justice Ministry describes the proposal as “just an initial impetus” and has provided neither a bill nor a timetable. Nor has Hubig suggested that landlords should be required to install or pay for air conditioning. The question is whether tenants should find it easier to obtain permission to install heat-protection measures themselves.
One route would be to add heat protection to Section 554 of the German Civil Code, which already gives tenants qualified rights to undertake certain alterations, including measures supporting accessibility, burglary protection and electric-vehicle charging. Consent would not become automatic: owners could still object or impose conditions where noise, fire safety, electrical capacity, the building fabric or neighbouring occupiers are affected. Costs, maintenance and reinstatement would also need to be settled.
The German Tenants’ Association wants policy to go further. It has called for a national heat summit and legal recognition that excessive indoor temperatures can constitute a rental defect. Managing director Melanie Weber-Moritz also argues that tenants may currently bear part of the cost of landlord-selected modernisation through higher rents without having much influence over which heat-protection measures are chosen.
Following Hubig’s intervention, the association welcomed the initiative. “It is now a matter of quickly translating this impetus into concrete legal improvements,” a spokeswoman said.
The association’s comparison with workplace rules requires qualification. Germany does not impose a simple statutory maximum of 26°C in offices. Workplace rules instead require increasingly strong protective measures as temperatures pass 26°C and 30°C; above 35°C, rooms are generally considered unsuitable for normal work without additional safeguards. Extending a comparable principle to people’s homes would be considerably more complicated.
Haus & Grund, representing property owners, sees no pressing case for a new tenant entitlement. Installing fixed air conditioning “usually involves alterations to the building’s structure, its statics and energy consumption”, the association argues. Noise, fire safety and the interests of neighbours may also be involved. Its preference is for landlords and tenants to make fuller use of existing legal arrangements.
From individual permission to portfolio strategy
For institutional owners, this is where the proposal becomes more than a dispute about comfort inside individual flats. A qualified tenant right would not itself create a landlord capex obligation, but it would reduce owners’ ability to treat cooling and shading entirely as matters of their own discretion.
Repeated applications for external blinds, façade penetrations, condensers and electrical work across a large portfolio could produce inconsistent equipment, extra technical reviews and disputes over noise, maintenance and reinstatement. Buildings divided into condominium ownership would add another layer of consent. A reform designed to help individual tenants could therefore encourage larger landlords to establish building-wide standards rather than process installations apartment by apartment.
That may also strengthen the case for planned, passive measures where feasible: external shading, insulation, improved ventilation, reflective roofs and planting can all reduce heat before energy-intensive cooling becomes necessary. As the Wüest Partner/Climada study found, older and poorly insulated buildings, top-floor apartments and heavily glazed homes are particularly vulnerable. The appropriate response, however, will vary from one property to another.
The policy question is therefore broader than whether tenants should be allowed to attach air-conditioning units to façades. Germany is beginning to treat protection from heat as a housing issue, but it has not decided who should install it, who should pay or how individual tenant requests should fit within the management of an entire building.
REFIRE: Nothing here is close to legislation: Hubig’s ministry describes the proposal as an initial impetus, not a bill. Making installations easier would not necessarily require landlords to provide or finance air conditioning. But it could move heat protection away from being entirely an owner-controlled improvement and towards a qualified tenant entitlement.
For institutional landlords, the immediate issue is therefore less a sudden statutory capex bill than fragmented alterations, competing technical demands and growing pressure to develop a coherent response across their buildings. Heat risk is entering tenancy law before Germany has settled who should bear the cost of managing it.