PROJECTS
   

Project
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Name: Countdown towards 2010 in Zagreb: community involvement in biodiversity assessment 
Project status: From: 2006-01-01 To: 2007-01-01 (Completed)
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Type (Programme): Ostali 
Instrument: Ostalo 
Project cost: -
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Croatian partner
Organisation name: Prirodoslovno-matematički fakultet 
Organisation address:  
Contact person name: Nikolić, Toni
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Contact person e-mail: Email 
Partners
Organisation nameCountry
ECNC – European Centre for Nature Conservation Nizozemska 
Short description of project
Action is now being undertaken - worldwide and in Europe – to stop the decline of biodiversity by the year 2010. To involve cities and their citizens in the 2010 targets it is necessary to provide a translation between European goals and the local level, relating the challenge to local issues and projects. This interdisciplinary project, combining the latest insights into urban biodiversity from social and natural sciences, aims to raise awareness among urban citizens, acquire important data on the state of urban biodiversity, and influence local decision makers to contribute to the 2010 targets. It will be a cooperation between two international partners: ECNC and ICLEI, and the City of Zagreb, the Croatian Ornithological Society, and the Division of Biology of Zagreb University. This project will focus initially on Zagreb, but the lessons learned during the project will be shared with national and local authorities and NGOs from the whole of Croatia. Zagreb was chosen because as the capital of Croatia it is in a certain sense the national ‘’showcase’’ and what happens in Zagreb easily catches the attention of policy makers and the media. But equally important is the fact the City of Zagreb has an active environmental policy and already had been exploring the possibility to develop a biodiversity programme. From a biodiversity perspective, Zagreb is also extremely interesting as it combines a variety of different habitat types within the city boundaries (mountainous areas, the Sava) and has a wide area of green spaces and parks. The main objective of the project is to raise understanding and awareness of urban biodiversity, both as a valuable component of European biodiversity in its own right, and as a means to generate support for, and active involvement in, the 2010 targets among the urban population, NGOs and local authorities. 
Short description of the task performed by Croatian partner
The project will • Establish a partnership between NGOs, the research community and local authorities in Zagreb in support of urban biodiversity; • Design and implement a community based monitoring scheme for urban biodiversity in Zagreb that will involve citizens as volunteers in biodiversity monitoring. This scheme will result in an initial inventory of urban biodiversity with a special focus on the occurrence in Zagreb of species of international importance, such as species listed in the Annexes of the Bern Convention, the Habitat Directive and the Birds Directive; • Carry out an awareness raising campaign in Zagreb on urban biodiversity and the links between the biodiversity of Zagreb and the wider ecological context as well as the 2010 targets. This campaign will involve the local media, and will also include an ‘urban biodiversity’ photo competition for the general public. • The project will be completed by a workshop to present the results of the biodiversity monitoring campaign and the lessons learned to other local authorities, and an exhibition of the best entries in the photo competition. Concretely, the results of the project will be: • Baseline biodiversity assessment of Zagreb; • Increased capacity to work on urban biodiversity among key stakeholders; • Increased capacity to involve community in programmes; • Established patterns of cooperation between key stakeholders • Greater interest among civic community for biodiversity issues and greater understanding of the link between local biodiversity and wider European ecological processes and policies. In addition, the results of this project will help to further develop local government action plans for biodiversity and to assist local governments to increase their capacity for systematically integrating biodiversity aspects into their local planning and policy implementation. 


   

Design by: M. Mačinković

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