Towards a wilder Europe

In "Towards a Wilder Europe" one can read all about Developing an action agenda for wilderness and large natural habitat areas.

There are few truly wild areas remaining in our highly developed continent, yet they represent an invaluable part of Europe’s natural heritage. In addition to their intrinsic spiritual and landscape qualities, and their important contribution to biodiversity conservation, such areas can offer significant economic, social, cultural and environmental benefits to local communities, landholders and society in general.

For this reason preventing further loss of wilderness, and ensuring implementation of large scale restoration opportunities, are important challenges. However we do not yet have a common vision for these vital areas and for their place in the broader objective of halting biodiversity decline.

Prague Conference on Wilderness and Large Natural Habitat areas

So the Prague Conference on Wilderness and Large Natural Habitat areas, jointly hosted in May 2009 by the Czech EU Presidency and the European Commission, together with the Wild Europe partnership, provided a critical platform to advance Europe’s agenda in this field.

A key outcome from the Conference was the development of the ‘Message (Poselstvi) from Prague’, which contains 24 recommendations from the participants on policy, research, awareness raising and partnership building.

Action Agenda

An Action Agenda was agreed in December 2009 at a meeting in Brussels of the Wild Europe partnership. Implementation of these recommendations, which has since begun, would create a Europe richer in wildlife with wild areas where natural processes predominate, maintaining and reinstating the natural identity of our continent for the profound benefit of future generations....