In mid-April, Bükk National Park hosted the launch event for an EU-funded project. More precisely, it is an Interreg CENTRAL EUROPE project called HUMANITA (= Human-Nature Interactions and Impacts of Tourist Activities on Protected Areas). The project is supported by the European Regional Development Fund.
HUMANITA aims to monitor and evaluate tourist activities in protected areas and find solutions and tools together with tourists and the local community to minimise humans' negative impacts on nature and raise awareness for an environmentally and nature-friendly way of living. In my opinion, this is a very important issue, so I think the EU money is quite well spent here.
For those of you who are interested:
www.bnpi.hu/hu/hir/humanita-nyitomegbeszeles-bukks...
www.interreg-central.eu/projects/humanita
www.bnpi.hu/hu/palyazat-2/humanita-hu
For the two-day meeting, all participating partner organisations from Austria, Slovakia, Italy, Croatia and Hungary were invited to the village of Bükkszentkereszt, located next to the area of the Bükk National Park. The partners consist partly of universities and research institutions, which bring the necessary know-how, and partly of so-called "pilot areas", i.e. national parks and protected areas, where the developed methods can be tested.
My honourable task during these two days was to take the minutes. Not such an easy task, considering that the days were filled with programmes from early morning till late evening and that the presenters could have spoken more slowly so that you could write everything down (but that would been much too easy ;) ). And, of course, the whole thing was in English. Luckily there were enough coffee breaks, and I got help from our Slovakian partner organisation. For doing something like this for the first time in my life, I managed my task quite well (I think :D).
Two interesting excursions were planned to clear our heads after the meetings. On the first day, we visited the Bükk Astronomical Observatory in the evening, including a guided tour and a view of the starry sky above the national park (unfortunately, only from the planetarium, as it was too cloudy for the telescope). The second day was concluded with a guided tour of the Anna travertine cave and St. Stephen's dripstone cave in Lillafüred.
It was an eventful two days, during which I could again take away many interesting things and learn a lot of new stuff!
