On Wednesday, September 15, at a meeting in Abuja (Nigeria), UNESCO will declare the Mura-Drava-Danube biosphere reserve in five countries, the so-called "European Amazon", which thus becomes the largest protected river area in Europe, WWF Adriatic has learned. --
The initiative to protect the river landscape of the Mura, Drava and Danube in Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia was launched more than 20 years ago by environmental activists and civil society organizations.
Work on the establishment of the Mura-Drava-Danube biosphere reserve officially began in 2011, when the environmental protection ministers of five countries signed a declaration on the establishment of a transboundary biosphere reserve, reminds WWF, a world organization for nature protection that has been part of the initiative from the very beginning.
The joint nomination, officially sent in April 2020, connected four pieces of the puzzle - biosphere reserves in Austria, Slovenia and Serbia, and the Mura-Drava transboundary biosphere reserve in Croatia and Hungary into a single protected area. It is the largest river protected area in Europe, which covers almost one million hectares and 700 kilometers of river courses, where about 900.000 inhabitants live, according to the WWF.
"The work to establish the Mura-Drava-Danube biosphere reserve was long-term, and it resulted in successful regional cooperation and united five countries around the same goal - nature protection. We would like to emphasize that the preservation of that area is the shared responsibility of all of us, regardless of administrative borders , because nature does not know them," pointed out WWF director Nataša Kalauz, as reported by Hina.
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