Communities in Transition: Protected Nature and Local People in Eastern and Central Europe by Petrova Saska;McDonald Professor Adrian;

Author:Petrova, Saska;McDonald, Professor Adrian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

… to continue to rely on polluting, indigenous coal for much of their electricity supply, in the name of energy security. And yet these problems fade in comparison with the Balkan countries, which continue to maintain an energy-inefficient industrial structure. (Bouzarovski 2009: 460)

While the resource intensity of CEE states decreased in relation to economic output, overall rates of consumption have skyrocketed during the past 20 years, due to dynamics of economic liberalization, and the improvement of living standards. This is perhaps best illustrated by the rapid increase in automobile use – a trend that started already during the 1980s as a result of conscious attempts by several governments to increase the provision of consumer goods. At the same time, there was a significant decline in public transport use, and a shift from rail to road freight use. The most significant changes occurred in the decade between 1990 and 2001, when car ownership per capita practically doubled across most countries in the region, while public transport decreased up to 50 per cent in the most extreme cases. However, there is evidence to suggest that such trends have been gradually levelling out in more recent years (Pucher and Buehler 2005).

The relaxation of land use and planning controls also led to the expansion of suburban and exurban sprawl. The process has been supported by a range of factors, including: i) the establishment of a real estate market, thanks to property restitution and privatization policies; ii) the entry of foreign capital, which often preferred investment in out-of-town developments; iii) cultural preferences towards single family homes, automobility and shopping in large shopping centres, mainly as a reaction to the lack of access to such amenities during communism; and, iv) institutional dynamics – in the form of tax incentives, indirect or direct subsidies, or strategic planning documents – that supported the construction of new commercial, industrial or residential structures in greenfield locations. It resulted in the construction of numerous retail and housing developments at the outskirts of urban areas, often in regions that lack the adequate infrastructure to support them, or are ecologically vulnerable. The process has often resulted in the loss of valuable agricultural land, or the fragmentation of forest ecosystems; as will be discussed in the following two chapters, protected areas have also been strongly affected by such dynamics. The problem has received widespread media treatment in regions and countries with a longer experience of sprawl:

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