Protected Areas: a playground for the inclusion of young people

Aims of the tool

The main objective of the project “Protected Areas: a playground for the inclusion of young people, is to facilitate the establishing of a structured and ongoing relationship between young people and the protected areas (understood as nature reserves, national parks, green and equipped areas and the institutions, bodies and organisations that manage them) aimed, on the one hand, at meeting the needs for dynamisation, involvement and inclusion of young people and, on the other, at improving the services and training, educational and management offers of the areas involved at both local and European level.

Description of the tool

Protected areas are of fundamental importance both for the protection of so called 'Natural Capital' but also for human well-being through the provision of Ecosystem Services that include environmental, social, economic, cultural, infrastructural aspects. In addition, most protected areas are located in rural areas with numerous examples even being in real geographically disadvantaged areas where services and opportunities are extremely limited. Consequently, it is of great interest to initiate and consolidate paths of interaction between those areas and young people to improve the limited or scarce existing opportunities and to facilitate processes of personal development, active involvement, dynamization and social inclusion.
The project “Protected Areas: a playground for the inclusion of young people” will last for 3 years with the purpose to realize an educational, formative and experiential path able to promote sustainable, inclusive and participatory development of young people and local communities interacting with Nature Reserves and National Parks. The project wants to facilitate an active involvement of young people in the development of protected areas under an infrastructural and communicative point of view including in this process the whole local communities and its different stakeholders.
In this book we are collecting the main outcomes of the first year of projects realised on the thematic of “Protected Areas: a playground for the inclusion of young people”.
First of all in order to share different backgrounds and activities of the involved partner organisations, information and documentation has been collected and organised at local and/or national level on examples of Projects, Activities, Campaigns carried out by associations or institutions able to explore the use of environmental education and protected areas as an opportunity for inclusion and which have initiated and reinforced processes of growth for young people and their communities. As far as Projects, Activities, Campaigns are concerned, we meant a structured and complex process organised through different steps that includes different methodologies, dynamics and exercises in order to achieve a given aim and specific objectives with a defined target group. All the good practices have been shared during the Erasmus+ Seminar that was realised in Borrello (Italy) from 12th to 17th October 2022.
The second International activity was a Study Visit that took place from 29 May till 4th June 2023 in Bulgaria between Chatama Forest Center on the coast of Beglika Dam in the heart of the largest mountain in Bulgaria, the Rhodopes, at 1520 m altitude, and the town of Velingrad (Southern Bulgaria) where mountains of the Rhodope chain were our main landscape. The main aims of the Study Visit was, thanks to interactive field visits, meeting with stakeholders, working sessions and planning activities, to explore, know and visit some interesting examples in Bulgaria of positive interaction between environmental education and protected areas as an opportunity for inclusion and growth of young people and their communities. The activities and visits have been chosen to offer a wide and inspiring range of methodologies, tools and practices which can improve the level of intervention and give continuity to the activities that the partners carry out in their local communities and to make more effective and efficient the processes of participation and social inclusion that mainly concern young people. At the beginning of the Study Visit an Editorial Board was constituted in order to be incharge to follow and report the different field visits that were realised. All participants were involved in the Editorial Board and they were divided in small groups connected with each visit. All the main information collected and acquired during the visits have been reported and collected in this publication.

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