“Nature and Man” Program: Partners’ Meeting
Representatives of the Silver Taiga Foundation Yury Pautov and Valentina Semyashkina took part in the regular meeting of the international Barents-Baltic “Nature and Man” Program held in Murmansk last week.
The program unites environmental NGOs in several Russian regions and is targeted at involvement of communities to environmental protection and nature management. The program is being rolled out in the Baltic region (Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg and Leningrad region), where the work is coordinated by the Coalition Clean Baltic, and in the north-west of Russia, in the Barents region (Murmansk and Arkhangelsk regions, Komi Republic, Republic of Karelia, Nenets Autonomous Area), where the Program activities are looked after by the WWF.
Representatives of partnering organizations from different regions met each other, presented their projects under the joint Program, and exchanged their experience. The experience exchange was arranged in thematic groups – members of “forest”, “river” and “tourist” local projects shared the achievements obtained through the first year of the project, challenges they had successfully overcome, learnings and the problems still unsolved.
During the first year of the Barents-Baltic “Nature and Man” Program the Silver Taiga Foundation partnered with its Arkhangelsk partners worked on involvement of the local residents of forest districts in the forest management process. Many villagers got an opportunity to participate in a three-day training course arranged in Komi, and at round table meetings they discussed social aspects of FSC certification having discovered anew the potential mechanism enabling local communities to participate in forest management. Following that event, Silver Taiga made residents of forest areas aware of the basics of GIS technology, and at the Forest Dialogue, the joint conference for all stakeholders, facilitated in May they discussed social effects of industrial logging, ways to minimize the negative impact, and social partnership development in detail …
During the “Nature and Man” Program partners from other regions, mostly organizations from Murmansk and Kaliningrad regions, developed such relevant for the Komi Republic areas of focus as public participation in fishery resource control, comprehensive river use management, environmental tourism, etc.
Owing to the meeting in Murmansk, the participants managed to discuss joint initiatives with partners from other regions and list them in the new project year action plan. Such initiatives included, in particular, exchange of practices related to sustainable river management development, the Atlantic Salmon conservation, involvement of the rural inhabitants in facilitation of environmental and ethic tourism…
Photos by Dmitry Ryabov, WWF Russia
