wildE project (2023-2026) is an EU Horizon Europe-funded project dedicated to exploring climate-smart rewilding to address the intertwined issues of climate change and biodiversity loss. The SlovakGlobe team is contributing to Task 2.3 Rewilding policies and politics as well as leading social research in the cross-border Tatras case study. In 2024 the acitivities of the Horizon Europe wildE project were carried in the spirit of developing an institutional analysis of rewilding policy framework at the European level and kicking the cross-border social-ecological research of the Tatras rewilding case study.

Stakeholders’ engagement

Slovak Globe research team, leading social research in this case study, was the main organizer of the WP2 project meeting and a stakeholders workshop, that took place in  late May 2024, started in Tatranská Lomnica and continued in Stará Lesná. This international meeting was attended by 31 participants from 15 organisations across Europe. On the first day of the meeting during a 15 km hike in the core area of the TANAP national park guided by Erik Baláž, wildE researchers experienced wild nature and admired the vigorous natural forest regeneration after windthrows. On the second day, the project consortium had the opportunity to discuss with 11 invited local and regional stakeholders representing Slovak and Polish local governments, NGOs, universities and national parks ‘representatives. An important starting point for this workshop was identifying current challenges at the local and national level. Some major issues included the management of the growing number of tourists visiting the parks, as well as strong pressure from (often non-local) companies to facilitate rapid communal development, which has been exacerbated by governance and management changes in TANAP. Furthermore, the discussion revolved around local people participation in managing national parks, with Polish TPN representatives particularly enthusiastic about giving locals more space. This workshop also introduced the topic of potential costs and benefits of rewilding for local livelihoods and tourism. The one-day workshop with stakeholders was concluded with an excursion chaired by State forests of TANAP. Participants visited a forest stand near Vyšné Hágy, a research area affected by calamity and then managed traditionally – fallen wood was removed and area was afforested. We could also observed an automatic measurement of photosynthesis which takes place there.

More about this event can be found on websites of  wildE project , European wilderness society and RTVS.

To dive deeper into the issue of rewilding implementation at the local scale in TANAP, a discussion with seven stakeholders organized by the SlovakGlobe research team took place in the town of Vysoké Tatry on November 13th, 2024. The first part of our discussion with local experts focused on challenges of TANAP management from different perspectives. Those concerned tourism development and its impact on environment, particularly on water quality; the balance between opportunities of small and medium businesses versus regional monopolies; innovative solutions and barriers of the sustainable mobility plan for the High Tatras region as well as the concerns about the sustainability of the unique climatic spa in TANAP, which could be affected by climate change and improper regional development in the future. The second focus of this meeting was to validate the relevance of attributes for choice experiment research method aiming to elicit Slovak AND Polish people preferences towards wilderness. Attributes identified by the Slovak, Polish and Danish research team are forest management, biodiversity and recreational access, which also consider the aspect of disturbances as a natural part of the Tatra Mountains life. The international research team is currently finalizing the first design and testing phase of choice experiment, and planning to run it in both countries of our cross-border case study (in Slovakia and Poland) in 2025 under the supervision of UCPH colleagues, who are the leaders of Task 2.5.

Knowledge sharing and projects´ collaboration

In August 2024, researchers from CETIP Network, Slovak Globe and Prague University of Economics and Business shared their knowledge about socio-ecological research with a focus on its economic aspects in Veľké Karlovice, Beskydy. They also tested behavioral role board game, that was newly developed under the HE COEVOLVERS project. Meanwhile, children of all three research teams participated Climatic Camp focused on multispecies justice during which they observed nature on field trips and played ‘Bear game’ in which they became a bear for a while.

During the Beskydy workshop in September 2024, scientific community from several international projects (HE COEVOLVERS, CA TransformERS, CA MARGISTAR, Earth System Governance project, Planet4B, TRANS-lighthouses, HE wildE) presented their project research results, discussed and explored together transformative potential of nature-based solutions as well as the role of co-creation of climate-resilient and inclusive communities with the goal to integrate multispecies perspective into the governance frameworks. For our team it was an excellent opportunity to learn more about different perspectives of nature based solutions concept and integrate them into the wildE research about institutional analysis of rewidling policy framework.

Our team is also actively networking with the Cost Action MARGISTAR and sharing as well as enriching the HE wildE research results. In the Cost Action MARGISTAR,  we are active members of the management committee in Working Group 2 which assesses current problems, alternative viable future visions, and pathways to marginalised mountain areas. By interconnecting the research of these two project and networking with scientists from multiple disciplines across Europe, we are increasing the professional experience and publication potential of our SlovakGlobe team.

Plans for 2025

Firstly, in February 2025, the annual meeting of HE wildE project will take place in Porto, Portugal. The SlovakGlobe team will kick off the institutional analysis of rewilding policy framework within Task 2.3 via interactive discussion with rewilding cases in project. Secondly, our team aims to expand the cooperation with representatives of Polish National Park (TPN) to better understand, analyse and search for sustainable development solution and increasing collaboration between key actors in corss-border uniting Tatra Mountains Biosphere Reserve. Thirdly, we will run the choice experiment in our cross-border Slovak-Polish Tatras case study which will be led by UCPH colleagues, leaders of Task 2.5. Fourthly, our team plans to publish research results from our two currently ongoing Horizon Europe projects wildE and COEVOLVERS in the MARGISTAR Special Issue I., for which Stanislava Brnkalakova is a member of editorial board.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation programme under grant agreement. Project Number: 101081231.