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Environment

Environment

 

ECO HVAR'S AIMS:

To initiate, organize, promote and encourage projects to preserve and improve the natural environment.

HOW?:

- through projects for education in organic methods of farming

- through projects for education in the use of biodegradable substances for household washing and cleaning

- through projects to reduce the use of poisons and chemicals

- through projects for education in waste and rubbish management

- through projects for education in recycling

- through  projects to clean up the environment

- through projects to establish valid international organic certification for products

- through co-operation with organizations having similar aims in Croatia and abroad

Caring for Hvar's Environment

Published in Environment

What inspired ECO HVAR for the environment

Caring for Hvar's Environment
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Bird Names

Published in Environment

Names in English and Croatian of birds commonly seen on Hvar, together with the scientific names. 

Pied wagtail, December 2015.
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Hvar's Wildflower Treasures

Published in Environment

The wildflowers on Hvar are a year-round joy. Even in the depths of winter, there is hardly a week without colours brightening up the countryside, contrasting with the island's rocks and the variegated dark green of the woodlands. 

Hvar's Wildflower Treasures
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Perilous Pesticides

Published in Environment

Good health depends on clean air, clean water and a clean environment. Hvar Island is perfectly placed to offer all those amenities.

Perilous Pesticides
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Glyphosate - GBH

Published in Environment

GBH is the acronym for Grievous Bodily Harm, a criminal offence in UK law. It also stands for glyphosate-based herbicides...

Glyphosate - GBH
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Orchids, Dalmatia's Secret Treasures

Published in Environment

Wild orchids are a special part of our environment. Are we looking after them?

Orchids, Dalmatia's Secret Treasures
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Diocletian's Palace, A New Look

Published in Environment

The Romans knew how to build, and they knew how to choose the best sites for their building. Diocletian's Palace in Split is a prime and well-preserved example. New discoveries in and around the Palace in recent years have brought about a major revision of the history of this magnificent Late Antique building project.

The Peristyle
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The Organic Alternative

Published in Environment

Organic farming: possible? YES! worthwhile? YES! Mihovil Stipišić from Vrboska is proving the point.

Organic cultivation, Vrboska April 2017
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Plants, crops, soil: Natural Protection

Published in Environment

When soil is contaminated, what ends up on your plate and in your cup or glass is less than healthy. Chemical pesticides and artificial fertilizers are causing untold damage. The 'conventional model' of agriculture is exhausting the earth and undermining human health. There are much better methods of protecting soil and plants using natural resources.

Field horsetail (Equisetum arvense)
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Rubbish Management 2018

Published in Environment

Rubbish management is a hot topic, not to say hot potato, around the world at the moment, especially in Croatia, where the European Directives which were laid down some years ago are finally due to come into force on November 1st 2018.

Binning litter, do it right!
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Starigrad Plain: Our Survey

Published in Environment

 

The results from our survey about land usage on the Starigrad Plain (Hora, Ager). The survey was conducted on behalf of LAG Škoji (Local Action Group), Eco Hvar and the Agency for the Management of the Starigrad Plain. The aim was to gain an overview of land usage, and to gather information as to what the landowners think is needed to improve conditions in this historic field layout.

Donkeys grazing on the Plain, 2nd June 2014.
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Eco Environment News feeds

  • Heat, drought and fire: how extreme weather pushed nature to its limits in 2025

    National Trust says these are ‘alarm signals we cannot ignore’ as climate breakdown puts pressure on wildlife

    Extremes of weather have pushed nature to its limits in 2025, putting wildlife, plants and landscapes under severe pressure, an annual audit of flora and fauna has concluded.

    Bookended by storms Éowyn and Bram, the UK experienced a sun-soaked spring and summer, resulting in fierce heath and moorland fires, followed by autumn floods.

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  • The mystery of flight MH370: will a new search find the missing airliner after more than a decade?

    In 2014 the Malaysian Airlines jet vanished over the Indian Ocean. Now the team that located Shackleton’s Endurance is looking again with the latest undersea robots

    More than a decade after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing after veering thousands of miles off course, its location remains unknown.

    The Malaysian government has promised to pay a private company, Ocean Infinity, $70m (£56m) to search for the plane on a “no find, no fee” basis.

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  • Country diary: A rare giant in the quiet of the wood | Sarah Lambert

    Old Sulehay Forest, Northamptonshire: Distant church bells are about all I can hear as I stand below a 500-year-old small-leaved lime – a tree that may be making an unlikely comeback

    On a bright winter’s day, I stand at the centre of a ring of multi‑stemmed small-leaved limes. Their gnarled bases are furred with moss and feathered with sprays of epicormic growth. Lime trees are notoriously hard to age, but this one is probably more than 500 years old, shaped and reshaped by centuries of coppicing, now with a vast canopy stretching nearly 20 metres.

    Looking up, I marvel at the intricate fractal lattice of branches and twigs of each tree. Every stem holds its own space, the crowns kept neatly apart from their neighbours – a quiet phenomenon known as crown shyness. This seems somehow appropriate, given how quiet the woodland is. It feels emptied, with only the rush of a chill wind numbing my bare fingertips, a peal of distant church bells, and a robin offering its muted winter song.

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  • Weather tracker: Polar wind set to end warmth in US south and midwest

    Spring-like weather experienced by many Americans to end, while heavy snow in Japan brings deadly conditions

    A week of extremes in the US as Arctic air plunges southwards across many states, sweeping away record-breaking warmth from last weekend. With low pressure in the west drawing up warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico, much of the south and midwest basked in spring-like weather this weekend with temperatures widely an extraordinary 15-20C above normal for late December.

    This week, however, most people will ditch their summer clothes for hats and scarves as a ridge pressure builds across the west, allowing for a polar air mass to dive southward, bringing freezing temperatures and the risk of snow.

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  • ‘Ghost resorts’: as hundreds of ski slopes lie abandoned, will nature reclaim the Alps?

    With the snow line edging higher, 186 French ski resorts have shut, while global heating threatens dozens more

    When Céüze 2000 ski resort closed at the end of the season in 2018, the workers assumed they would be back the following winter. Maps of the pistes were left stacked beside a stapler; the staff rota pinned to the wall.

    Six years on, a yellowing newspaper dated 8 March 2018 sits folded on its side, as if someone has just flicked through it during a quiet spell. A half-drunk bottle of water remains on the table.

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  • ‘It brings you closer to the natural world’: the rise of the Merlin birdsong identifying app

    Merlin has been trained to identify the songs of more than 1,300 bird species around the world

    When Natasha Walter first became curious about the birds around her, she recorded their songs on her phone and arduously tried to match each song with online recordings. After a friend recommended Merlin Bird ID, a free app, she tried it in her London garden and was delighted to discover the birds she assumed were female blackbirds – “this is how bad a birder I was” – were actually song thrushes and mistle thrushes.

    “I’m obsessed with Merlin – it’s wonderful and it’s been a joy to me,” says Walter, a writer and human rights activist. “This is what AI and machine-learning have been invented for. It’s the one good thing!”

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  • First of nine new river walks in England announced for north-west

    Mersey Valley Way takes in Manchester and Stockport on its 13-mile route with other walks to be identified in 2026

    A new river walk has been announced by the government as ministers try to improve access to nature in England.

    The 13-mile (21km) walk will go through Greater Manchester and the north-west of England. There will be a river walk in each region of the country by the end of parliament, the government has pledged.

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  • What happened next: Maggots, rats and growing despair – a year of the Birmingham bin strike

    Action began in January, before an all-out strike in March. For locals, the flytipping, vermin, maggots and mess are taking a huge environmental and emotional toll

    It’s an icy cold winter morning, and 80-year-old Mohammed Bashir is armed with a broom, tackling the large pile of rubbish that has accumulated outside his terraced house in Small Heath, Birmingham.

    This has become an almost daily activity for Bashir since the city’s bin strike started 50 weeks ago and, like many in the city, he is starting to lose patience.

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  • ‘It would drive some people crazy’: Victoria’s French Island remains remote, and that’s how most like it

    Just 70km from Melbourne yet only accessible by ferry, the island’s isolation is the source of its appeal and its biggest drawback

    Approaching French Island on the ferry at dawn, if you’re lucky you might be greeted by the sight of hundreds of ibis in flight. From far away, they look like starlings in murmuration, the flock constantly swelling and shifting like the sea far beneath them.

    Just 70km from Melbourne in the middle of Western Port Bay, French Island is a remote haven hidden in plain sight. While nearby Phillip Island boasts popular holiday attractions, a motorcycle grand prix, a population of nearly 14,000 and a bridge to the mainland, French Island – twice its size – can only be accessed by an expensive, intermittent two-car barge from the small town of Corinella, or passenger ferry from Stony Point. It’s a refuge for native wildlife and for a small human population – just 139 in the last census – who live entirely off-grid and prefer things to stay quiet.

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  • ‘When you plant something, it dies’: Brazil’s first arid zone is a stark warning for the whole country

    The Caatinga in the north-east has been transformed by the heating climate in just a generation and could become the country’s first desert

    Every Tuesday at dawn, Raildon Suplício Maia goes to the market in Macururé, in Brazil’s Bahia state, to sell goats. He haggles with buyers to get a good price for the animals, which are reared in the open and roam freely.

    Goats are the main – and sometimes only – source of income for the people of Macururé, a small town in the Brazilian sertão.This rural hinterland in the country’s north-east is known for its dry climate and harsh conditions.

    Raildon Suplicio Maia, a goat farmer from Macururé sells his animals at the market. Grazing has disappeared and he now spends any profit on feed

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