Research

The future of wild in Europe

Our partners, the Wildland Research Institute and the University of Leeds, will be hosting an important Wilderness related conference in September 2016. The event is entitled ‘The Future of Wild in Europe’. If you are a Wilderness advocate you should think of attending and submitting a paper (deadline 1 April).

We believe that in order to discuss about the future of wild (and Wilderness hopefully), we should know what the current status of the Wild(erness) in Europe is. The best way seems to be the evaluation of actions that were taken since the European Parliament adopted its special resolution on Wilderness in 3 February 2009. This resolution defined 24 calls to action addressed largely to the European Commission but sometimes also to the Member States (9 cases). After checking what actions were taken, we found the European Commission much more active than EU Member States. The EC took several actions towards improving the protection of Wilderness in Europe (especially in the framework of the Natura 2000 network), most of the Member States showed almost total ignorance!

What’s to be blamed? What could the reason of this ignorance be? We believe that a more proactive communication approach can help. As the European Commission defined in its Agenda for Wilderness and Wildland there is a clear need to invest in mass communication to the wide European audience about Wilderness and wild values. We hope that the future of wild conference will help identifying the best ways and techniques to gain the public support for Wilderness. Hopefully the conference will be an interdisciplinary forum, where speakers interested in ecology, biology, but also communication experts will gather together.

…and if you, dear reader, can help our Society to increase the voice for Wilderness in Europe, please help us!

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