Experts view Hungarian conservation success from the air

Budapest, Hungary: Experts and leaders from WWF’s One Europe More Nature program celebrated their final meeting last week by taking a hot-air balloon flight over the region covered by the project in Hungary.

WWF started the One Europe More Nature program to implement sustainable business practices in eight European countries. These programs show how business interests and nature conservation can coexist to profit people as well as nature.

Began in 2003, the program set out to solve environmental problems by developing, testing, and implementing practical business partnerships which benefit business, nature, and local people.

The program came to end this year, and was considered very successful. All of the pilot projects developed under the program delivered benefits for conservation, as well as jobs and new income for local people.

„Nature conservation organisations have tended not to focus on financial profits,” said Charlie Avis, leader of the OEMN project. „We now have real-life examples that companies can derive profits when they use nature in a sustainable way.”

„By integrating nature into their business models, conservation becomes their interest too,” Avis said. And then when nature returns, as it is doing across all the project sites, all sorts of other economic opportunities open up.”

The program is based on a Dutch business model focused on brick production and floodplain restoration, and was developed in Spain, Romania, Greece, Hungary, Estonia and Marocco. In Spain and in Morocco farmers produce strawberries using less freshwater and fertiliser; in Romania and Estonia biodiversity and landscape conservation works by natural grazing and sustainable tourism development and in Greece the famous giant beans is produced in a way that the biodiversity of Prespa-lakes remain on a high level.

In Hungary the pilot project’s goal was to restore biodiversity in floodplain grasslands of the Tisza (Eastern Hungary) by producing local renewable energy and at the same time increasingly diversifying local income streams.

Large areas of the land formerly covered by an aggressive, invasive shrub (Amorpha), together with less productive arable lands, are now being given back to nature, to restore the floodplain’s former glory.

The Amorpha is bought by a local power company and burnt as renewable biomass for green electricity production. Some of the area is being replanted with willow trees, which will also serve as a long-term, sustainable supply of “biomass” for the power plant. Participating farmers are obliged to set some lands aside for wetland and grassland conservation, the management of which will be paid for by revenues from biomass sales.

„We believe – as do our partner sin the commercial sector - that this is the way of modern nature conservation, and hope the pilot programs show good, inspiring examples for others to learn from and maybe replicate,” Avis said. „This approach of partnering business with nature has huge potenital for moving the world to a greener future and there are opportunities everywhere for initiatives which are good for nature, good for people, and good for business.”