The co-founder and CEO of Tesla announced his intention to build a factory near Berlin to the public back in November of last year. This would be Tesla’s very first European factory, to be named Gigafactory 4. Gigafactory 3 recently began trial production in Shanghai, and the rest of the plants are located in the United States. Tesla is already counting on the German Gigafactory 4 plant to begin production in 2021.

However, Reuters noted that the plant project has not yet obtained a building permit, and the company is therefore managing the site of the future plant at its own risk.
Hospodářské noviny, on February 17, 2020, informed the Czech public that a German court had suspended the site preparation. The court is acting on a complaint filed by German environmental activists. The court ordered Tesla to immediately halt the clearing of the forest where the plant is to be built until it reviews the complaint filed by local conservationists.
Hospodářské noviny also points out that if the court had not intervened, Tesla would have completed the forest clearing in just three days—and thus before a decision on the environmental activists’ complaint. Bloomberg reports that if Tesla does not clear the trees by the end of March, construction will likely be delayed by six months due to the mating season of local wildlife.

According to CNBC, Tesla has promised to plant a forest three times larger than the one it clears as compensation. According to the BBC, it has also promised to safely relocate colonies of ants, bats, and reptiles found in the area of the future Gigafactory 4 site.
Do you think planting a new forest three times larger is fair compensation, and should the company continue with construction, or would it be better, in your opinion, to suspend construction entirely? How do you think the court will ultimately rule?
To follow the current situation, we recommend Hospodářské noviny, from which the above information was sourced.