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Dear TRANSGREEN Newsletter subscribers,
With this final message to you in the frame of TRANSGREEN Project, I would like to thank you all for your interest and support in the successful implementation of the Project (January 2017 – June 2019).
TRANSGREEN’s vision was to create a better-connected Carpathian Region with transport infrastructure that takes nature into consideration. The project aimed to find positive solutions, which bring all relevant parties together and jointly plan transport infrastructure.
Over 2.5 years, TRANSGREEN demonstrated how a multi-sectoral planning process for transport infrastructure development could look like when key sectors - transport, environment and research - collaborate. The project objectives focused on scientific research, minimisation of conflicts and cooperation. The results are ready for you to explore in the Final TRANSGREEN Brochure and the project publications that are available in the project website library (dtp.interreg-danube.eu/transgreen).
The project’s main achievements:
- Representatives of more than 480 organisations took part in the project implementation. In this way collaboration between the transport and nature conservation sectors through trust building could be improved. This is true for all participating countries, at the local and national level. An example is Slovakia, where the National Motorway Company and the State Nature Conservancy started to bi-laterally find solutions for critical zones along transport routes.
- TRANSGREEN “Wildlife and Traffic in the Carpathians. Guidelines how to minimize the impact of transport infrastructure development on nature in the Carpathians” are endorsed by the 7 Parties to the Carpathian Convention and adapted to national needs with the involvement of relevant stakeholders in Romania.
- “Keeping nature connected. Environmental Impact Assessment for integrated infrastructure planning – Training Package” and related workshops help increase capacity in Ukraine right on time, where the Law on Environmental Impact Assessment was adopted in autumn 2018.
- “Catalogue of measures. Beskydy-Kysuce cross-border area (Czech Republic-Slovakia)” influences development of the Defragmentation Programme in the Czech Republic provide good solutions for the pilot area. In addition, three more "Catalogues of measures" for the pilot areas located in Romania and cross-border in Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine were circulated among and discussed with relevant stakeholders.
- Results of the ecosystem service survey will be incorporated into the Hungarian National Map of Ecosystem Services.
- Scientific knowledge increased and collected at the platform “Carpathian Countries Integrated Biodiversity Information System” and capitalized and taken forward within the frame of ConnectGREEN.
- TRANSGREEN supported international stakeholders to develop the “Draft Joint Strategic Action Plan related to the Carpathian Convention Protocol on Sustainable Transport Development in the Carpathians” and triggered the ratification of the Sustainable Transport Protocol in January 2019. The adoption of the Joint Strategic Action Plan is expected at the next Conference of the Parties to the Carpathian Convention in October 2020.
Meanwhile, a new project proposal has been developed and submitted to DTP to follow up and to intensify our work on highlighting the importance of ecological corridors and their maintenance/restoration in relation to linear infrastructure development in the Danube basin.
Let us keep the momentum, also in the light of the European Union’s Green Deal for Nature and in forefront of the Post-2020 Biodiversity Strategy to be developed in 2020, mainstreaming biodiversity into policies of key economic sectors.
With best regards,
Hildegard Meyer & the Project Team
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