Eco Hvar

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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

  • Christian leaders alarmed by climate crisis raise questions over GB News owner’s £28m church donations

    Exclusive: Sir Paul Marshall’s climate views and those broadcast on GB News said to be ‘in direct opposition’ to those of Church of England

    The co-owner of GB News, a British TV channel accused of broadcasting climate change denial, has donated £28m to influential Church of England institutions that support climate action.

    This raises “serious questions”, say Christian leaders, given that Sir Paul Marshall’s views on the climate crisis and those frequently broadcast on the TV channel are “in direct opposition” to the Church of England, which believes that “responding to the climate crisis is an essential part of our responsibility to safeguard God’s creation and achieve a just world”.

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  • The Galápagos is a wildlife haven. But is that enough to protect the rare scalloped hammerhead shark?

    The species is abundant within the protected archipelago but when they migrate outside the marine reserve to give birth they run the gauntlet of industrial fishing

    The unmistakable fluted T-shape of a scalloped hammerhead shark slides by, followed by a diver holding his breath and a metal spear like an extra-long snooker cue. The spear hits the fish behind its dorsal fin and the 2-metre shark darts away, disgruntled but otherwise unharmed.

    Carlos Robalino, a marine biologist from the Galápagos Islands, trained as a shark researcher in Mexico but is now back home and working as a junior researcher at the Charles Darwin Foundation. When we meet in March, he is one of the divers on the foundation’s research expedition to Darwin and Wolf, the most northerly islands in the Galápagos marine reserve.

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  • ‘Electrify daily life’, urges Cop31 host

    Third of world’s energy needs should come from electricity by 2035, says Murat Kurum, as priorities set out for this year’s UN climate summit

    The world should aim to meet a third of its energy needs from electricity within a decade to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the host of the next UN climate summit has said.

    While about a third of global electricity generation already comes from renewable sources, other energy-intensive sectors – chiefly transport, heating and industries – have lagged behind. Close to four-fifths of final energy still comes from fossil fuels, as a result.

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  • World’s largest banks pledged $906bn to fossil fuel companies in ‘unfathomable’ increase in 2025, report finds

    JPMorgan Chase leads 65 banks making decisions incompatible with restraining rising temperatures, researchers say

    The world’s largest banks committed $906bn in financing to the fossil fuel industry last year, an “unfathomable” increase in investment locking in years more of coal, oil and gas production as the world continues to overheat, a new report has found.

    The surge in new fossil fuel lending, up $64bn or nearly 8% on 2024, shows that the world’s largest 65 banks are making decisions incompatible with international agreements to restrain rising global temperatures, according to the coalition of environmental groups behind the new analysis.

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  • Ping-pong sponges, ‘black smokers’ and floating somethings: the secrets of the deep sea

    The bottom of the ocean has barely been explored, but every journey to the deep reveals wondrous new lifeforms. As underwater mining gains momentum, we risk destroying one of the Earth’s last great wildernesses

    On 8 March 2014, at 1.20am, Malaysian Airlines flight 370 veered off its scheduled route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. An hour later, military radar spotted the plane heading west over the Andaman Sea. Six or seven hours later, it is presumed to have crashed somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean, one of the least studied bodies of water in the world.

    Just how little we knew about this part of the ocean became clear during the subsequent search for the missing aircraft. Before a proper underwater search could even begin, a vast stretch of seafloor had to be mapped. Over the next three years, a team of ships from Australia, China and Malaysia scanned the bottom with a combination of submersible robots and ship-borne sonar. Together, they charted a swath of ocean roughly 1,500 miles long and 150 miles wide, encompassing an area the size of France. The maps produced from these scans revealed a lost world, full of undersea canyons, crevasses, volcanic plateaux and a single, enormous cliff taller than the Swiss Alps. Even the abyssal plains, thought to be some of the flattest areas on the planet, were home to previously uncharted hills.

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  • Country diary: Ladybirds and wasps are the unsung heroes of the farm | Colin Chappell

    Brigg, Lincolnshire: With harvest approaching, we’re putting the glorious long evenings to good use, and both humans and insects are working hard to protect the crops

    There’s something magical about the long evenings in June, the warmth and the way the setting sun casts long shadows across the fields. The extra hours are much-needed though as there is plenty to do.

    We’re in the run-up to harvest in July, so if the weather is dry we walk up and down the seed crop tramlines, pulling out (rouging) unwanted wild oats, brome and blackgrass. They drop seeds that could contaminate not only our ground, but potentially someone else’s. Strict numbers govern how many of such plants are allowed per hectare in a seed crop, and independent inspectors check the results. Government officials in the Animal and Plant Health Agency will even walk the higher quality seed crops.

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  • ‘Severe’ stress on oceans as rate of sea level rise doubles in 10 years, UN warns

    Global effort needed to limit effects of pollution, industrial fishing and climate crisis, World Ocean Assessment says

    The world’s oceans are under “severe and accelerating” pressure from human activities, with the rate of sea-level rise double that of a decade ago, according to a damning assessment from the United Nations.

    The “intensifying” stressors, which include pollution and large-scale industrial fishing, are cumulative, said the report, resulting in widespread biodiversity loss and putting ocean systems under “severe strain”.

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  • This LA neighborhood is choked by smog. The solution: a network of sensors on offices, homes and bags

    Pacoima is hemmed in by highways and heavy industry, and its residents are fighting pollution with hyperlocal air quality monitoring

    Jose Luis Salas looks up at the ladder. “Are you ready?” he asks Shance Taylor, an environmental project manager who’s holding a white container, about the size of a shoebox, covered with wires and numbers.

    Taylor nods and climbs up to reach the side of Salas’s tidy house in Pacoima, a neighborhood in Los Angeles’s north-east San Fernando valley. The curious box in their hands is known as Aeroqual sensor – part of a community air-quality monitoring program run by Pacoima Beautiful, a local environmental group.

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  • Elusive gull drifts thousands of kilometres off course to Australia, turning birdwatching into ‘extreme sport’

    ‘Twitchers’ rush to coastal Western Australia to see black-headed gull, which usually flies between Europe and Asia

    A lone seabird has caused a stir in the nation’s birdwatching community after landing on the Western Australian coast, thousands of kilometres off its usual migratory flight path.

    The black-headed gull, which usually flies between Europe and Asia, has been spotted in the coastal city of Geraldton.

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  • Giving guitarfish a chance: one man’s mission to persuade fishers to farm giant snails instead

    Marine biologist Issah Seidu has found a way for Ghana’s fishing communities to earn a living – and help protect the ancient and critically endangered fish species

    Guitarfish are an odd-looking and ancient species, with the tail of a shark and the flattened body of a ray, but their coveted fins have driven populations to the brink of extinction. In west Africa, where their meat is also a local delicacy, many guitarfish species are among the most critically endangered fish in the ocean.

    Conservationists at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) describe the slow-maturing ray, which produce young annually, as an “indicator species”, which reflect the overall health of an ecosystem and pose challenges in the way coastal fishing of them is managed. The IUCN red list categorises more than half of guitarfish species as critically endangered.

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