In the last week of March, we returned to the beautiful Bosnian countryside around the Pecka Visitor Centre. We have been working in the Balkans for years to protect Europe's last wild rivers, which are threatened by the uncontrolled construction of small hydroelectric dams. Now, with support from the Transition Promotion Programme of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we are helping local organisations - the Centre for the Environment, the Aarhus Centre Sarajevo and the Dr Stjepan Bolkay Centre - to designate new officially protected areas.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country with one of the highest levels of biodiversity in Europe. Its romantic gorges, karst areas and rivers are home to more than 250 different ecosystems and biotopes, some of which are still home to endangered or endemic species. Yet only about three per cent of Bosnia and Herzegovina's territory is protected, compared to the European average of almost thirty per cent. We want to change this.
Together with partners from the joint project "Jewels of Nature of Bosnia and Herzegovina", we planned future activities during the March trip, from biological surveys to a summer camp on the Rzav River. On Friday, a seminar was held at the Pecka Visitor Centre to discuss the local – quite complicated - system of officially protected areas. We have also opened an exhibion of large-format photographs of "our" rivers by Majda Slámová. It shows both the wild rivers themselves and the enchanting panoramas of the surrounding hills, inviting visitors to explore them.
Check out photos from the exhibition HERE
And that is exactly what we did the next day. Together with about twenty other visitors, mainly environmentalists, we set off on an excursion to nearby Sana Springs. Here, the roughly 150-kilometer-long river literally flows out of the rocks and merges into a single stream in the bends of an almost untouched valley covered in low forest. Together, we hope to preserve this and other jewels of Bosnian nature for both future generations of locals and visitors.
We have a long history of working in the Balkans, including a successful campaign to stop the construction of fifteen dams on the Neretvica River. We were at birth of the broad civil Coalition for rivers. We also published a series of analyses and proposals for better protection of the environment and the rights of local communities or helped to make the source of the Sana River an official natural monument. We proposed the Declaration for the Protection of Rivers in the Western Balkans, which was signed by dozens of organisations and was even adopted by the parliaments of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
