Erda RTE

The latest selection round of Jean-Monnet project applications was lucky for Erda RTE: JM project GRASS - EU governance of natural resources: geopolitics, regions and sectors was approved for funding. This 2-year action is led by our Russian partner, Pskov State University, and includes 5 more partners. The research focus is on the development and impact of EU natural resource policies on Belarus and Russia. We will organise 3 seminars exploring biodiversity governance, as well as Arctic and Baltic dimensions of EU natural resource governance, a final conference in Pskov wrapping up our researc findings, and develop at least 4 papers (the ambition is to put together a special issue of a high profile journal), and a policy brief in Russian.

We are happy to share that as a selection outcome of the Erasmus+ application round for capacity bulding projects for higher education (K2), two projects submitted with participation of Erda RTE have been awarded! The selected actions are:

SUNRAISE - Sustainable Natural Resource Use in Arctic and High Mountainous Areas

and

INTENSE - Integrated Doctoral Program for Environmental Policy, Management and Technology

We are excited to start working on these fascinating actions! We'll keep you informed!

Rural–urban peripheries under socioeconomic transitions: Changing planning contexts, lasting legacies, and growing pressure, a paper co-authored by Anton Shkaruba and Viktar Kireyeu has been published in Landscape and Urban Planning.

The status of urban forests and other green open spaces has always been ambiguous within the context of rural-urban peripheries. On one hand, most European countries have introduced protected green zones around cities to contain their sprawl and to provide urban dwellers recreational space and sanitation services since the early days of city planning policies. On the other hand, the ecosystems of green open areas remain under high pressure due to high demand for suburban land, causing issues ranging from illegal dumping to ecosystem fragmentation and forest loss. In Eastern Europe, in particular in the former USSR, rural-urban peripheries went through series of socio-economic transitions that resulted in complex interplays of socialist and post-socialist institutions. In this paper we explore these interplays in the context of land-use dynamics of rural-urban peripheries of two middle-sized cities in Belarus (Mahilioŭ) and Russia (Pskov), with p

Erda RTE contributed to an international conference on green infrastructure in cities and organized by our partners from EKAPRAEKT NGO in Mahilioŭ, Belarus. The event took place on Nov 3-4 on the premises of Mahiloŭ Technological Park and Belarusian-Russian University. Among the participants of the conference were representatives of the city government, municipal service companies, academia and NGOs from Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. The conference was organised under the project Co-management of Green Infrastructure project implemented by EKAPRAEKT, and was discussing the issues brought forward by the project and the range of solutions explored by it. Erda RTE experts were involved in research and communication activities of this project., and contributed to it by providing Dutch experience in green infrastructure development and co-management of green spaces.

Our third summer school The Precautionary Principle: Governance of Innovation and Innovations in Governance co-organised with Central European University (Budapest) and European Environment Agency has been approved for the summer 2017! The call for applications will be announced soon!