Montenegro

GIS gains importance for environmental management as Montenegro progresses toward the EU

Podgorica, 23 December 2010

In the frameworks of UNDP’s project “Geographic Information System (GIS) for Environmental Protection”, fifty two employees of the Montenegrin sectors of environmental protection, hiking and biking clubs and local tourism organizations were ceremonially awarded certificates after a several months long training to use GIS as a tool to improve their daily work and efficiency. In the past five years over fifty Government agencies and NGOs were assisted through the project in terms of using GIS, and fifty five other experts from the sectors of forestry, biology, meteorology, geology, seismology, mountain climbing, etc., have also successfully finished training to use GIS earlier. This currently makes a network of over 100 professionals who use GIS to enable efficient and effective management in all the mentioned areas in Montenegro.

UNDP will continue providing support to Montenegrin governmental and non-governmental institutions in using GIS as an essential tool for a more effective management of natural resources and more informed decision making through focus on protected areas, sustainable tourism and spatial planning.
 
UNDP Montenegro, the Ministry of Spatial Planning and Environment and the Ministry of Tourism organized a joint media conference to officially mark successful termination of a course with the objective of strengthening capacities in the sectors of tourism and environmental protection to improve management in these areas and ensure environmental sustainability.

“Over the past 20 years space has gained in importance, and  in this period, significant changes occurred. Information technologies advanced and they provide more efficient operations. Managing space and use of the latest technologies is a new opportunity and challenge ahead of us in the next period, and we need to to make the most of it. All spatial planning documents that we developed in the last two and a half years have a GIS background. The State Spatial Plan, the special-purpose plan for the highway Bar-Boljare and the Adriatic - Ionic highway, the Spatial Plan for the Coast of Montenegro were also informatically processed,” said Mr. Branimir Gvozdenović, Minister of Spatial Planning and Environment at the Government of Montenegro. He considers important that the GIS is applied to national parks Biogradska gora and Lovćen. Gvozdenović announced that the youngest protected area - the fifth national park - Prokletije will be processed in the same way, and that by the end of next year all spatial and zoning plans for the whole country will be processed. “The figure of 52 participants who completed the course and this specialization is a serious number for the territory of Montenegro, and it has two dimensions. The first dimension is that in this way we have ensured the new staff, we have strengthened the capacity needed for a more professional and better managing of this area, and on the other side we raised the level of our agendas and the need to talk about and to implement GIS - meaning that we are planning funds in our budgets for its implementation,” Mr. Gvozdenović concluded.

Mr. Predrag Nenezić, Minister of Tourism at the Government of Montenegro explained that the GIS is also partly a sub-project of the strategic project “Hiking and biking in Montenegro” which is defined in the strategy of tourism development as one of the most important directions of development of tourism in the inland, northern and central parts of Montenegro. “By 2020 we can become a leader in the Mediterranean when it comes to hiking and mountaineering. With GIS it is possible, because information technologies are the future of countries that seek a place on the tourist map of the world,” said Minister Nenezić, noting also that 4.200 kilometers of trails have already been informatically processed.

Ministers Gvozdenović and Nenezić pointed out that the project of developing the geographic information system successfully came to life thanks to the support of UNDP. Mr. Alexander Avanessov, UN Resident Coordinator/UNDP Resident Representative to Montenegro said that GIS is very important in the process of joining the EU. “This is especially important in regard to the ongoing processes of EU accession. Reporting to various international institutions and adhering to commitments from international treaties can now be done in an easier way, with more precision and less effort,” said Mr. Avanessov. He expressed hope that the participants in the training would continue to use the skills acquired in their daily work, helping management to make more constructive and better informed decisions related to environment. “Also, I hope that those skills will help you to improve data sharing between the institutions but also with general public. The best example of purposeful usage of GIS is the flood that affected Montenegro recently, for the second time this year, where crossing of all relevant data in order to get various kinds of maps of affected areas can be of substantial help in early warning and timely assessment of the situation and further recovery activities,” Mr. Avanessov emphasized.

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How will GIS be further used in projects supported by UNDP Montenegro?

UNDP will continue strenghtening national and local capacities for using the geographic information system for a more informed and effective management of natural resources in the key developmental fields in Montenegro: spatial planning, protected areas and sustainable tourism.

Through two cross-border cooperation projects, UNDP will work with the Mountaineering Rescue Services in Montenegro and in Croatia on one side and local municipalities in Montenegro and Serbia (Berane and Prijepolje) on utilizing GIS to promote sustainable use of natural assets, to improve the quality of the tourist destination and products, to engage in joint planning and cooperation and increase knowledge, infrastructure and safety precautions in the cross-border regions.

GIS is a tool for preservation of natural processes as well as protection and development of natural assets. Creation of a database containing spatial data from various fields (forest surveillance data, geography, hydrology, geology, etc.) enables protected area management to search and analyze the collected data. As a result they are able to produce thematic reports that are used in order to determine the conditions of nature protection, protected areas management and usage of natural assets. In parallel with data focused on natural assets the GIS enables regular database updates, analysis and production of various thematic reports focusing on different topics. One of them is tourism. This is a very effective tool for parks visitors’ management. They assist in communication between managers, the public and the academic community, since they are able to provide simple visualization of objects and areas of interest.

Using GIS in spatial planning process will enable traditional tasks to be performed more efficiently and tasks, previously impractical or impossible, to be easily accomplished. GIS can provide services, such as improved access to information, online mapping, optimized workflow and streamlined business practices, that were not previously available in order to create more effective local governments.

Advantages of GIS in spatial planning:
•         time consuming;
•         faster and easier decision making, easier control over project, addition and data issue;
•         faster and easier comparison with other spatial plans;
•         faster data exchange with other planning agencies;
•         spatial plans designed in GIS can be published through GIS Web services.

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Geographic information system (GIS) is a set of technologies, processes, human resources and data from different areas (environmental protection, tourism, meteorology, forestry, water management, etc.) that can be compared, verified and used together in various researches, for the purpose of management of natural resources in a sustainable manner.

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Environmental GIS for Montenegro

Sustainable management of natural resources cannot be made without decision making based on cross sectorial, timely and spatially accurate data. By introducing GIS as a tool into environmental sector, the project improved transparency in management of natural resources. Activities in this project were oriented toward establishment of sector related components (and eventually whole) of National Spatial Data Infrastructure (forestry as best practice) as well as support to the Government of Montenegro in capacity building and institutional setup related to ensuring environmental sustainability.

Programme Components:
1. Basic layers: In order to establish common layers for data input various basic layers have been created - topo map mosaics with scale 1:25k to 1:200k, hydrography and soil maps with 1:25k scale, digital terrain model, as well as various vector data - municipal borders, state borders, roads, rivers, lakes, urban areas, etc..
2. Capacity building:
- Forestry sector – 36 people from Ministry of Forestry, Forestry Directorate, and
- Environmental Protection - 15 environment related institutions (public, private and civil sector)
- EcoTourism sector – 40 people from local tourism organisations and biking and hiking clubs

UNDP Montenegro started introducing the GIS in the forestry and environmental sectors in May 2005, with the financial support of the Governments of Finland, Japan and Montenegro and the UNDP, amounting to $1.1 million. Partners in the project have been the Government of Montenegro; Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management; Ministry of Spatial Planning and Environment; Ministry of Tourism and Environmental Protection; Forestry Directorate of Montenegro; various environmental institutions from academic, public, private and civil sector; LuxDevelopment; GTZ; etc..

Over the course of five years, jointly with our partners:

• we made various maps of Montenegro - topographic, hydrographic, geologic, soil etc., which became a common foundation for all of the data of Institutions from these sectors;
• we supported the process of creation of the National Forestry Policy, through the working groups and our partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management, and with international organizations;
• we created a network of more than 100 people in almost all the institutions related to environment, forestry, tourism, spatial planning, cadastre, hiking and biking, eco-trails, seismology, geology, meteorology, etc. - who are using these maps and the GIS in their daily work, contributing to the improvement of management in their respective sectors.