The international conference „Sustainable development in practice – trends, experience and challenges” took part on March 8-9, 2011 in the conference centre Dwor in Tomaszowice by Krakow. The event was an attempt to define the global trends in sustainable development, their understanding and implementation by Polish businesses.
The two-day conference consisted of panel discussions and workshops and gathered about 100 representatives of public and private sector as well as NGOs.
The event started with an introduction on implementation of sustainable development principles on Polish and international Greenways – communications routes that promote sustainable transport and are developed as a complex in order to preserve the environment and increase the quality of life of the local communities around them. The conference turned a great occasion for summing up the results of Active Ecological Education on Greenways project, with the framework of which the Environmental Partnership Foundation distributed about 550 acknowledgement certificates to companies, organizations, institutions and schools.
The conference also served and occasion to award the Ecological Education Centers. Those are winners of the competition initiated by the Environmental Partnership Foundation and launched in December. It was aimed AT NGOs, businesses, schools and institutions that possess at least one of the ecological certificates: Clean Tourism, Bike-Friendly, Green Office, Local Environmental Activities Centre/Green Flag.
The purpose of the competition was to define partners, who will create the network of centers cooperating with the Environmental Partnership Foundation to promote ecological lifestyle through Greenways, - stated Ewa Figorska, coordinator of the project within the framework of which the competition had been organized. The Committee, namely Rafal Serafin, President of the Environmental Partnership Foundation, Anna Kalinowska from Warsaw University and the University Centre for Natural Environment Research, and Jan Okulicz, councilman of the foundation selected 12 winners, 6 of which got certificates for 5,000 euro.
The conference participants also took part in the panel discussions, the purpose of which was defining of the world trends in sustainable development, exchange of ideas regarding the public green demand, three-sector partnership and corporate social responsibility. The experts worked to determine the criteria for evaluation of sustainable development. The final stage of the conference was a workshop, in the course of which the participants tried to draw the possibilities of joint activity of the public, private and the community to intensify sustainable development initiatives in Poland, to suggest concrete solutions and their implementation.
