First Stakeholder's Meeting in Croatia
Febraury 16th - Nature Park Medvednica, in Croatia, celebrates its first Stakeholders meeting to discuss the monitoring of a new ski centre to be developed in the park.
Nature Park (NP) Medvednica is one of the 11 partners of the CEETO project and also one of the 8 Pilot Areas for developing new models and tools aimed to find the most innovative, efficacious, transferrable and feasible solutions to improve integrated environmental management capacities for the protection and sustainable use of natural heritage and resources.
On February 16th, the first Stakeholder's Forum meeting was held in NP Medvednica, which in 2014, was awarded with the European Charter for Sustainable Tourism in Protected Areas. Since the development of a new ski centre plan has recently been adopted in this park, the main objective of the meeting was to establish an innovative and effective monitoring scheme of its impacts during the whole year, including both winter and summer activities
Stakeholder's meeting at NP Medvednica
The ski centre in NP Medvednica was established in the early ‘70s and it is rather small, counting with 5 ski slopes and a total length of 4,300m. Today the ski centre works at less capacity than in its beginnings, as some of its infrastructure is out of date or even obsolete. The new plan aims to expand the ski centre to its previous extent and to build new infrastructures for producing artificial snow, new energy efficient ski lifts and an accumulation lake 6-7 times larger than the existing one. Due to the future development of these infrastructures, NP Medvednica has chosen the ski centre area as the area to test CEETO Pilot Actions.
At the Forum meeting and workshop, twenty experts from different fields gathered. Most of them had previously done research and the monitoring of nature and environment in this park, whereas there was also one expert on LAC methodology (Limits of acceptable change). During the meeting, CEETO project was shortly introduced by WWF Adria to all the gathered participants. In addition, NP Medvednica presented the ski centre as the Pilot Area and main objective of developing the monitoring scheme of ski centre's impact in the park, emphasizing the need to choose environmental and nature indicators for its monitoring
Ski Centre at NP Medvednica
After the presentations, a discussion ensued where experts showed their interest to participate in developing the monitoring scheme proposal. They shared their experiences collected during their field work during the last 15 years and all agreed to prepare for the next meeting their soil research results, artificial snow analysis and phytocoenological analysis of the area, based on which a list of indicators will be created. Next meeting of NP Medvednica Stakeholders is planned for the beginning of April.
