Tartu City Government (TCG) hereby supports the Project “Reversing the decline of pollinators in Baltic states by decreasing the effects of anthropogenic landscape changes and supporting policy and decision making”, LIFE BEEscapesto be submittedin the 2022 LIFE call for proposals for under the LIFE programme sub-programme Nature and Biodiversity.
The Project will be coordinated by Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies (LLU) with involvement of partners from state authorities, scientific, municipal and non-governmental sector organisations in Baltic States.
The Project aims to reverse the decline of pollinators in Baltic states by focusing the Project activities on improving the condition of habitats required for pollinators. Among the aims, there are increasing biological diversity (number of pollinated species and population in general) in the region, improving the monitoring of pollinator species abundance and distribution, implementing and testing innovative approaches and methods for determination of the most efficient management measures in agricultural lands, grasslands, forest lands, degraded land, as well as urban environment. The project will take actions for public awareness raising on the issue, promoting stakeholder collaboration, citizen engagement action and bringing together public and private sectors in activities for achieving the goals of the Project.
The Project is designed to have cross-cutting sectoral benefits as the results and impacts of the Project reach to accelerate progress towards halting and reversing the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, protection and conservation of nature capital, increasing the sustainable land use and farming practices. Through supporting pollination and pollinators, the project thus contributes also to the food security, which is in coherence with the targets of TCG. In particular, the Project will provide recommendations on how to support pollinators in urban environments. It also promotes citizen science that will significantly improve the monitoring procedures and data on changes in pollinator population.
Therefore, TCG highly appreciates the given opportunity to collaborate in the LIFE BEEscapes Project. Where relevant, we agree to align the LIFE BEEscapes solutions, management recommendations and expertise in implementing the urbanLIFEcircles project (project 101074453 in LIFE-2021-SAP-NAT), which is directly targeted towards introducing adaptive community based biodiversity management in urban areas for improved connectivity and ecosystem health and where the concrete conservation efforts take place in more than 600 ha of urban greenery areas in Tartu.