Alps / Europe

The Swiss Federal Office for Water and Geology and the Swiss Federal Chancellery have published a dictionary on flood protection in German, French, Italian and English.

The web site of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps CIPRA-International recently underwent a complete makeover. Information on CIPRA and its member organisations is now posted in a trendier layout at www.cipra.org , with items such as News, Events (e.g. Summer Academy or Annual Conference), Activities, Publications and Positions.

For the fourth time keepwild!, the specialist environmental department for trend sports of Mountain Wilderness Switzerland, together with the Save the Mountains Foundation, is awarding the Prix Wilderness for Trend Sports.

It took 15 adolescents from Austria, Slovenia and Italy only one week to erect a solar installation at the leisure centre of the Austrian Klimabündnis [Climate Alliance] municipality of Gurk. The activity was part of the youth solar project "Together for a Sunny Future", and was supervised by technicians from AEE, the Working Party on Renewable Energy.

In future clinics in the Allgäu region are to be provided with nutritionally balanced meals made from regional and ecological produce. Bavaria's Agricultural Minister Josef Miller referred to the brand programme Aus gutem Grund [On Good Grounds] as a milestone in regional marketing. He added that the initiative could well pave the way for the use of regional produce in community catering.

On October 4 the European Transport Initiative ITE is once again co-ordinating a European-wide day of protest action against transit traffic in mountain regions.

For years the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps CIPRA has been demanding that the Alpine states draw up a Water Protocol to the Alpine Convention. In Innsbruck/A CIPRA itself tabled a proposal for such a Protocol to coincide with the UN's International Year of Freshwater 2003.

The new Interreg Project "Gene Save" is to preserve and maintain old local grain, vegetable and apple varieties in southern and northern Tyrol. Seed and planting stock is to be collected, preserved in a gene bank and then re-introduced into cultivation on a wider scale.

On Sundays in summer in the past few years the high plateau in the area of Colle del Nivolet was regularly transformed into a giant car park. However as of this summer the plateau can be reached only on foot, by bicycle or by shuttle bus.

This year's CIPRA annual specialist conference is to address the implementation of the Alpine Convention with a special focus on the issue of (transit) traffic.