Carpathian nations agree on forest management and tourism at UN-backed meeting

Seven Carpathian States, meeting at a United Nations-backed conference in Bratislava, today agreed to strengthen efforts to protect, maintain and sustainably manage the forest range that they all share.

Ministers from Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine approved a protocol that also covers cooperation on tourism in the 100,000 square kilometres of forests in the Carpathian range that links the forests of the north and those of the west and south-west of Europe.

“We think that this conference has been able to provide a vital platform for the future cooperation of the Carpathian Member States in order to guarantee an appropriate development of our beautiful region,” said Jozsef Nagy, the Minister of Environment of Slovakia, which hosted the three-day meeting.

The agreements were reached at the third meeting of Conference of the Parties to the Carpathian Convention which was signed in 2003. The Interim Secretariat of the Carpathian Convention (ISCC) is administered by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in Vienna and hosted by Austria.