08.07.2022.
Ecomanager is one of four projects for which the Croatian forest management company Hrvatske šume withdrew resources form the EU funds through the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development and the Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund. To mark the start of the project, a preliminary conference was held gathering all stakeholders in this HRK 136m worth project. The amount will be invested in sustainable and efficient stewardship of forests in the Natura 2000 areas by integrating the process of forest planning and environmental protection and drawing up 167 forest unit management programmes. The project ensures additional training of the staff about other component parts of the forest ecosystems, and it will facilitate direct communication with other stakeholders in defining conservation goals and measures, and mapping habitat types.At the conference, Nataša Dankić Sliepčević, the head of the Department for verification of environmental and nature protection projects at Intermediate Body level 2 of the Fund, pointed out that the European Green Deal and the EU Biodiversity Strategy until 2030 recognised the importance of forests, as well as the contribution of forests and the entire forest-based value chain to achieving a sustainable and climate-neutral economy by 2050, while at the same time ensuring adequate protection of the existing ecosystems. “Projects like this one, and the other three – Naturavita, Fearless Velebit and Karlovac Karst on which the Fund’s IB2 collaborates with Hrvatske šume, totalling around 1 billion kunas, comply with the green, sustainable goals. They will contribute to the conservation of the environment and numerous species of flora and fauna that make our country unique,” said Dankić Sliepčević.
The director of the Nature Protection Directorate at the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development Igor Kreitmeyer said that the research community had been warning for decades that anthropogenic activities were exceeding the ecosystem’s sustainability capacities. “We all have to make more efforts and leave our comfort zone regarding the way we use natural resources. The key goals we have to attain are protection of 30% of the land and sea, which we’ve already achieved on land, but also put 10% more under strict protection. These ambitious goals for the European continent arise from the fact that there’s almost not a foot of our European land where man has not disturbed natural processes in one way or the other,” said Kreitmeyer.
Krunoslav Jakupčić, the president of the Management Board of Hrvatske šume, could not hide his pleasure with the project’s “go live”. “I’m proud of the Ecomanager project we’ve presented, its importance is exceptional, and the relevance of its implementation is part of our development plans. Ecomanager will improve the quality of our work and take the possibility of resource use to a higher level, and this is what we’re committed to,” he said at the opening of today’s conference.
The project is implemented on the territory of the Republic of Croatia, and it is co-financed by the European Union from the Cohesion Fund under Operational Programme Competitiveness and Cohesion 2014 – 2020.
