South East European Environmental CSOs network SEENET met at Island of Šolta

From 5th to 9th July 2016, 38 representatives from 23 CSOs from South East Europe, Turkey and the EU have gathered at the “Solar Academy” on the Island of Šolta, Croatia to discuss cooperation on environmental protection and sustainable societies.

We want to have good cooperation in this region, and therefore we have setup SEENET, a regional network of environmental CSOs that work on energy, transport and natural resources issues from the perspective of environmental protection and sustainability. The network has been operational for six years now, and here at Šolta we have accepted 5 new members to the network: Bosna art Stjepan Polje, Center for karst and speleology, LIR Evolution, and Sanus, from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bird Protection and Study Society of Serbia from Serbia. With these new members SEENET now has in total 29 members from all around the South East Europe. In the next year the coordination board of the network will be: CEKOR (Serbia), Center for Environment (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Green Home (Montenegro), EDEN (Albania) and Zelena akcija – FOE Croatia (Croatia).

Focus of the work will be to stop new coal power-plants in the region, prevent oil drilling in Adriatic sea and promote sustainable management of rivers in the Balkans.

This meeting was organised as part of the project “Advocacy CSOs networks for sustainable use of energy and natural resources in the Western Balkans and Turkey – ETNAR”, funded by the European Union within IPA Civil society partnership framework to strengthen capacity of the CSOs in the region. We are actively transferring experience from European partners – Friends of the Earth International, Friends of the Earth Europe, Zelena akcija – Friends of the Earth Croatia and Henrich Boell Foundation to CSOs in the western Balkans and Turkey.