Alps / Europe

Una montagna per tutti (a mountain for everyone) is the name of an Interreg project between Italy and France that was launched only recently and focuses on people with disabilities.

The Austrian Tourist Club [Österreichischer Touristenklub] recently opened the first high-alpine passive building, namely the Schiestlhaus am Hochschwab/A at 2,153 m.

Mountain Wilderness International regularly trains young mountain guides in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The first Alpinism course focusing on a caring approach to nature in the upper Panshir valley was completed only recently. 22 young Afghan men and women took part in the training course.

A new study analyses the impact of a potential climate change on hydrological discharge regimes from the Swiss Alpine region for the period between 2020 and 2050. Eleven catchment areas with different glaciation rates and altitude ranges were examined.

The Alpine Network of Protected Areas is celebrating its 10th anniversary as part of the international conference on "Alpine Protected Areas: Between History, Development and Challenges".

Via Alpina, the project for a network of long-distance hiking trails, now features a new internet website at www.via-alpina.org . The Trails heading provides an opportunity to travel all 341 stages of the Via Alpina virtually, using interactive maps of different scales.

As part of the MARS Interreg IIIB project (Monitoring the Alpine Region's Sustainability) 22 partners from six countries (A, CH, D, FL, I, SI) worked on drawing up a set of indicators for measuring and evaluating sustainable development in the Alpine region.

The Alise project (Alps IT Service Network) is designed to provide those small and medium-sized businesses for which IT operations have become a burden with all the IT services they require directly from the Network.

The Future in the Alps competition being held across the Alps has been very well received. By the July 20 submission deadline individuals and organisations from all eight Alpine countries had submitted more than 570 projects.

Representatives of Bavaria's Ministries of the Environment, Economic Affairs, Agriculture and the Interior, and of the Bund Naturschutz have agreed on around a dozen climate protection measures in a further step in implementing the Climate Protection Alliance they concluded in 2004.