CIBIOGO - Project video and partners’ expectations
In order to raise awareness of biodiversity and the protection of protected areas, it has been considered essential to produce a short promotional video in which have been presented all the objectives and the project activities that Cibiogo aims at completing within its project deadline, with the hope that the citizens have become more aware of the importance of the environment and its problems.
For the period 2021- 2027, the European Commission has launched the Interreg Europe programme that is targeted at contributing to all the EU priorities and of which Cibiogo is an integrated project "Policy objective 2, Greener Europe – Biodiversity preservation".
Being the biodiversity’s protection and preservation very urgent and critical issues in all the EU, the idea of CIBIOGO is to influence regional/ territorial policies for an active citizens’ engagement in the governance of biodiversity and the sustainable management of ecosystem services. The proposed governance refers to the process of enabling the citizens to be more participatory in public decision-making and consequently, it is necessary to overcome the public apathy towards biodiversity and its protection.
Few of the most important objectives that Cibiogo aims at achieving are:
- Contributing to the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, that sets out to turn at least the 30% of land and seas into coherent and effectively managed protected areas.
- Integrating ecological corridors as a part of a real trans – European natural network.
- Safeguarding the protected areas and the strengthening of the ecosystem’s services.
- Facilitating the disclosure of environmentally – friendly territorial development strategies.
In order to achieve all these goals, a cooperation among governments, authorities, stakeholders and citizens must be ensured through participative processes, which may help to overcome conflicts, a scarce dialogue but most of all the lack of biodiversity and ecosystems values, as well as the improvement of the policy instruments through a continued exchange of good practices and interregional peer-reviews, that will reflect on a local level improving the engagement of the communities and stakeholders in all the partner regions.
«Thanks to the exchange of experiences during the first part of the project, we expect to acquire a lot of knowledge and tools, in order to put in place a better and a more inclusive governance to involve the citizens and the stakeholders and to achieve a better strategy for the valorization and preservation of Biodiversity […] » Rosalia from Italy.
«We have high expectations from this project, and they are mainly connected with experience exchange and lessons that we could learn from the other partners and their practices that they are implementing together with their stakeholders in their own countries. For the time being we are focusing on some specific things, such as citizens’ engagement in biodiversity protection management processes and the management of nature trails […] » Ilze from Latvia.
«Our aim with this project is learning from the other partners about the ecosystem services, ecotourism and about the involvement of the citizens in the context of biodiversity […] » Emőke from Romania.
«We are extremely interested in taking part in this project since the topics of citizenship and the improvement of the governance are interesting to us, especially in the frame of the different policy tools that we want to implement in Wallonia. So, we hope that our participation in this project could be a success in terms of good practices exchange and network building […] » says Luc from Belgium.
Rosalia, Ilze, Emőke, Luc are only a small part of the project, whose all-members’ expectations seem to aim at citizens’ involvement and at an intense exchange of experiences and knowledge among the different partner regions.