EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - UNESCO World Heritage

pushing the envelope through personal contacts, business contact with study tours operators,
targeted advertising, publishing and visual media
On the other hand, the natural and cultural values are little known among non-experts due to a
lack of an active information policy. Currently, the overall numbers of visitors are rather low
compared to countries such as Poland, Hungary or the Czech Republic, partly due to
country’s short existence and the lack of presentation on the part of the state government. For
example, the Austrian, Hungarian, Czech, and Polish governments spent 49.4, 41, 5.5 and 8
million USD respectively for advertising their countries as tourism destination, compared to
only 1.6 million USD spent by the Slovak government for that purpose.
Objectives
a) Expanding an integrated and interactive internet information systems providing information
on natural and cultural history of concerned regions and their infrastructure for ecotourism
and interpretative tourism: expertise provided by the Centre for Scientific Tourism in
Slovakia (www.poznajachran.sk, www.ecosystems.sk).
b) Expanding the system of interpretative tourism scheme Carpathicum, based on local
tourism infrastructure and focused on the natural and cultural heritage and their underlying
connection (topics: vymenovať)
III. Promoting environmental protection and resource management
Mimicking of Carpathian natural forests patterns
Forests in the partner countries have the potential to contribute significantly to torrent control
and flood avoidance, replenishment of water reservoirs, carbon accumulation in forest
ecosystems, landslide and erosion control, geo- and biodiversity protection, and feature
recreational, cultural and various other social values.
According to the Strategic Research Agenda of the Forests Based Sector’s Technological
Platform, that potential depends entirely on ensuring the sustainable character of forestry, on
using research to make wood a more predictable engineering material, and on reducing the
input of material, energy and work per unit wood and wood based-products. All these
assumptions seem to be seriously compromised across Europe: The burning of fossil fuels
may lead to problems in applying the traditional concept of sustainable forestry, in which site
factors are assumed steady-state (Wagonner 1994, Kauppi 1995). The predictability of wood
as material is limited due to wood market volatility, amplified by wood availability being a
delayed function of the demand. And finally, the profit margins from wood utilization are
often not high enough to cover the necessary silvicultural measures in many countries
(Commarmot et al. 2000).
In this situation, nature-based management of forest resources becomes a principal doctrine
aimed to narrow the gap between managed and nature forests patterns, to ensure higher forests
stability, to provide for a diversified supply of wood and to achieve desired forests functions
at lower costs. Therefore, the major aim of this network is to find new ways of how
substantially more natural patterns and processes normally taking place in the primeval forests
can be harnessed for the benefit of forest resources management under global changes. The
highly integrated approach goes far beyond of what has been achieved in this field thus far.
The partnership overcomes geographic and interdisciplinary fragmentation and establishes the
critical mass of capacity in order to bridge the limited, site- or region-specific character of the
available knowledge and to significantly advance the theory and practice of nature based
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