PICK ONE LEAVE NONE - WESTERN BALKANS

ended

This project is focusing on outdoor sports. More precise, the focus is on the environmental impact of recreational hiking and mountaineering activities on marked and maintained trails in nature. We are geographically focused on the Western Balkans area as it has significantly more prominent environmental problems than the rest of Europe. The outdoors is recognized by the European Commission as a key way to engage people with health enhancing physical activity as the analysis shows that 40% of those participating do so in the outdoors. The numbers of participants in such activities are going in a good direction, but the concern is how to ensure that this happens in ways that are sustainable, responsible and with minimized impact on ecosystems and the ecology of the natural areas, of which hiking trails, as probably the biggest public sport terrains are a part of. The project proposes an idea of simple and widely applicable outdoor ethics for the recreational hiking population that should bring sustainability on hiking trails regarding the non-degradable solid waste problem. Essentially, it is a very simple idea that every hiker who accepts our concept to leave nothing in nature and to bring back with him only one piece of solid garbage that he finds on hiking trail, becomes small part of big movement which is needed to bring sustainable solution of the problem. Through our partnership, we want to analyze the problem, to propose and test a few variants of the system, to choose the most usable one and to disseminate the idea to the rising number of hikers and mountaineers. Analysis and testing procedures will be conducted on 4 different types of mountains, in 4 Western Balkan states included in the project.