WWF: News from nature

already two months have passed since I last reached out to you with some news from nature. Well, this springtime brings some spring news. Keep reading to find out what’s new in the world of nature protection. 🐼

• Another Earth Hour 💡

We’ve celebrated another Earth Hour. This worldwide known volunteer action included over 190 countries this year, numerous organizations and companies, as well as individuals who turned off their lights for an hour or used that hour to make something good to preserve our planet.

We used that day to plant the first (we hope, of many) “food forest” in the city of Koprivnica 🌳 in Croatia. With the enormous help of students and city representatives, we planted fruit trees and other plants that will be publicly available for citizens to use.

You can find out more about the action here.

• Oh, but we didn’t stop there!😄

The very next day we repeated the whole action from Koprivnica in Sombor in Serbia. We’ve made the arrangements with the City of Sombor, the director, professors and students from elementary school “Dositej Obradovic” quickly and agreed that we all want to bring back to nature at least a small part of what we took from it. So we planted more than one hundred seedlings in a polyculture orchard. 🍎 The best of all is that it is a public, sustainable place and will be inherited by future generations!

We truly hope these are just two of many cities in which we will introduce permaculture and a self-sustainable way of life.

• We’ve also celebrated Earth Day 🌎

Last Saturday, on the 22nd of April, our planet Earth also had its day. We have celebrated it jointly with the Croatian Rowing Federation and our golden rowing brothers Sinković, Damir Martin and other rowers by talking about the importance of rivers and their conservation.

Rivers are the source of life. We need to understand that the water we use every single day does not come from the tap, it comes from nature. By polluting and destroying rivers, we are doing enormous damage to ourselves.

Find out more about our work on rivers here.

• We visited the areas that we plan to restore as part of the „Restoring the Amazon of Europe“ project 🏞

While we are still on the topic of the importance of rivers, we mustn’t forget our Amazon of Europe! The Amazon of Europe (Mura-Drava-Danube), the world’s first five-country biosphere reserve, was designated by UNESCO. Together with the donor of the project “Endangered Landscapes Programme”, which is the Cambridge Conservation Initiative in partnership with Arcadia, we visited the area along the Mura River in Slovenia. In the town of Lendava, we symbolically planted five Linden trees and dedicated them to Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. We visited the „Međimurska priroda“ visitor centre in Croatia, the confluence of the Mura and Drava rivers, the Lankocz forest in Hungary, the Apatinski rit in Serbia and Nature Park Kopački rit in Croatia. Although the journey was challenging, the experience was priceless. 💚

• Our campaign Vila Wilderness won silver at Bal Cannes 🏆

And for the very end, our campaign “Vila Wilderness”, which aimed to raise awareness about illegal construction, won a silver award in the Social Responsibility category at the BalCannes Awards at tDK Festival in Rovinj last week. We are thankful to the Communis agency for their effort on this campaign and proud that the importance of this topic is recognized. 🙏

Thank you for reading Siniša! Your support means the world to us! 🐼