Raising environmental awareness in local communities by joint conservation of bats in cross border regions of Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine

This project was born due to a negative attitude of a large group of local people in the Cross Border area toward bats. This can lead to the degradation of the natural sources, overturning the sustainability of the ecosystem in the targeted territories of Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine. Bats are key element of the ecosystem since they are directly responsible to the agricultural pest control (consuming insects). Due to the myths and fairy tales created by people, bats become subjects of prejudices. The extinction even of one bat species will provide enormous ecological losses and a wide scale of ecosystem collapse.
This project will focus on the protection of bats in the targeted region, by concrete conservation actions like: proper assessment of the endangered bat populations, making alternative shelters of bat colonies (bat boxes, warning chambers), also will focus on the protection of cultural values like protection of the religious objects in churches (cleaning the churches from bat guano). Several public aware actions will be implemented: a mobile exhibition, common workshops of bat box preparation with locals, a documentary movie dedicated to bats. The
results will be disseminated by printing materials (guideline and work for children), by webpage and social media (FB) and by warning panels (Bat friendly church). Our target groups - priest, eparchies, church administrators, NGOs, local people - will be aware about the importance of bats and their conservation. This is an innovative project because the partners in four countries will act in synchronized way, sharing good practices, and attracting a huge number of local people in the activities of bat protection, sharing its knowledge and the project visibility professionally not just at country level, but at international level as well.