Big Success of the Green Weekend at Pomorie Lake

The cleaning was implemented within the international volunteer campaign – The Big Green Weekend. In the action took place volunteers of Green Balkans NGO and students from the Professional secondary school for tourism “Professor Asen Zlatarov”- Plovdiv. Official guest at the event was Mrs. Milena Yarmova, representative of the Regional Inspectorate of Environment and Waters in the town of Burgas.

The dunes of Pomorie Lake are situated  within a protected territory according to the national law, the European Directives and the Ramsar convention. They are a rare habitat sheltering a number of rare plant species, incl. such of the Red Data Book of Bulgaria. Due to human activities several invasive species from Asia and North America are now growing on the dunes of Pomorie and on many other places in Bulgaria. The alien plants are very adaptive and aggressive and threaten to supplant the local species. Thus, their timely removal is a priority conservation activity.

The good news is that only for several days, within the Big Green Weekend, the volunteers managed to clean a significant part of the dunes from the invasive plants. The experts from Green Balkans NGO consider that with several additional volunteer campaigns and regular monitoring, the dunes of Pomorie Lake may preserve their natural condition.

The Big Green Weekend is an international initiative, which aims at promoting volunteering as an entertaining and very profitable way of caring about nature. This year nine European countries participated in the initiative - Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Italy, Great Britain, Estonia, France, Germany and Holland. The initiative is being supported by Stavros Niarchos Foundation within a project of the Conservation Volunteers Alliance (CVA).

For more information:
Neli Arabadzhieva – Green Balkans NGO tel.: 0884 25 77 11
narabadzhieva@greenbalkans.org