The EU's current Alpine Space Programme will end this year. The programme management team has therefore commissioned a group of experts to identify the future challenges facing the Alps and draw up a basis for the new programme. After one and a half years of discussion, the final report is now ready.
The result of the analysis is that climate change, the energy transition, the globalisation of the economy, the knowledge society, increased mobility and demographic change will all considerably affect life in the Alps in future. The effects will however be very different in individual sub-areas of the Alps, e.g. in the cities, in tourist regions or in shrinking rural areas.
The experts recommend that, from 2014, the Alpine Space Programme should follow six strategic aims, among them biodiversity and landscape as well as the sustainable use of the natural resources of the Alps. Topics such as social diversity and integration or the promotion of entrepreneurial activity are given more prominence than in previous approaches.
The results of this strategic study will be incorporated into the new programme document that will stipulate the content and functioning of the Alpine Space Programme for the period 2014 to 2020. The document is currently being drawn up; it is to be presented for discussion this summer and finalised in the autumn. New project ideas can then be submitted in 2014.
Strategic study and further information: www.alpine-space.eu/about-the-programme