Alps / Europe

More than 600 participants from all over Europe recently convened in Lucerne/CH for this year's Swiss Tunnel Congress to find out more about the state of progress with the New Alps Transversal Route, or Neat.

The June issue of the Journal of alpine research bears the title "Future research and transnational cooperation in the Alps". Four contributions in two languages (French and English) are devoted to this theme.

Within the project "Future in the Alps" of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps CIPRA, experts have collected, prepared and put on the web exhaustive knowledge about sustainable development in the Alps. With this, the part of the project called "alpKnowHow" has been completed, and the extensive knowledge base is online at www.cipra.org/zukunft .

In Austria the Federation recognises the potential of the Alpine Convention (AC) and, in the future, it will directly fund its implementation. So far, the AC was often considered as pure "prohibition law". Recently it has found access in the Austrian Federation programme for country development.

At what point is Europe on the way to halting the loss of biodiversity by 2010? With respect to this issue, the European Environment Agency has drafted a report in English, in which a chapter is devoted to biodiversity in mountain ecosystems.

The focus of the 2003 - 2007 "Brain Drain - Brain Gain" Project is the development, introduction and evaluation of action plans that reduce the migration of skilled labour from peripheral regions and instead favour migration into these areas.

Through the tool of the land use certificate (FNZ) the growing land consumption in Switzerland shall be limited. With the brochure "Recovering land - land use certificates in land planning" the environmental organisation Pro Natura wants to bring the discussion about this tool in the public arena.

The Austrian Ministry for Transportation Innovation and Technology is committed to the establishment of the wildlife Alps-Carpathian Corridor.

An international workshop on global climate change research will take place also this year on 4 - 6 October in Wengen/CH.

The fifth European Mountain Convention will take place on 14 and 15 September in Chaves in Portugal. It is organised by Euromontana, the European Association of Mountain Territories and its slogan is "Cohesion for growth - mountains as natural ingredients for Europe's competitiveness ".