The SaveGREEN project, co-funded by the European Interreg Danube Transnational Programme (2019-2022), focuses on the identification and promotion of good solutions for safeguarding ecological corridors of international importance from the Alpine across the Carpathian to the Balkan Mountains in Central and Eastern Europe, an area in Europe that still provides large intact and connected habitats for wildlife.
Economic development including transport projects and land use change affects the functionality of ecological corridors, mainly by creating barriers for migrating wildlife and by destroying and fragmenting their habitats. There is a lack of experience on how to plan mitigation measures in an integrated fashion, which includes relevant sectors such as nature conservation, transport, agriculture, forestry, and spatial planning. Integrated planning ideally starts in an early stage of a project to guarantee best solutions for wildlife and people alike. To be able to create proper mitigation measures, planners need to consider the surrounding landscape to guarantee free movement across bottleneck areas caused by such projects.
SaveGREEN will tackle the problem by fostering the dialogue between different sectors involved in economic development and will contribute to the improvement of cross-sectoral practices relevant to green infrastructure for planning integrated mitigation measures, their implementation and monitoring.
SaveGREEN will provide scientifically sound tools to assess structural and functional connectivity in bottleneck areas of ecological corridors, a capacity-building programme for relevant authorities on integrated planning instruments including EIAs and SEAs, and a cost-benefit analysis. Furthermore, SaveGREEN will create 8 pilot cases for the assessment and improvement of the functionality of threatened ecological corridors in Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine. A standardized monitoring tool will be developed and applied, conclusions drawn and cross-sectoral operational plans elaborated together with local and national stakeholders.
At the political level, SaveGREEN will promote the mainstreaming of green infrastructure in sectoral policy and decision making at the national and European level, with a focus on financing green measures and the development of green infrastructure standardization. Close cooperation with the European Strategy for the Danube Region (EUSDR) and the Carpathian Convention will strengthen these efforts.
The SaveGREEN project consortium represents entities with complementary fields of experience (nature conservation, transport, spatial planning, environment impact assessment, and research) supported by public and state-related entities for agriculture, the environment, forestry and transport from Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, and the Infrastructure and Ecology Network Europe (IENE).