On 15 and 16 October 2018 in Skopje, a two-day regional conference gathered over the 100 participants from South East Europe (SEE) countries and territories to present results of two-year EU funded project “South East Europe Urban Resilience Building Action Network – SEE Urban”.

The project focused on prevention of the urban disaster effects, protection of people’s lives, environment and property. This has been achieved by sharing and adapting the best municipal Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) practices, building, improving and institutionalizing cooperation at local and regional level, as well as by raising public awareness on the need for cross-border DRR.

The main results of the SEE Urban project in Serbia include four River Basin Protocols prepared and signed, as a form of local level DRR cooperation: in the Western Morava River Basin (17 LSGs), Kolubara River Basin (8 LSGs); the Great Morava River Basin (12 LSGs) and Upper Danube River Basin – Banat watercourses (19 LSGs) – including a total of 56 towns and municipalities in Serbia, out of 174 (32 %). Additionally, 5^th River Basin cooperation (along the Drina River) was initiated in June 2018, with formalization expected in November 2018, as well as the 6^th River Basin cooperation in the Lower Danube - Backa Watercourses.

Additionally, the SEE URBAN project directly contributed to the Amendments to the Law on Local Self-Governments of the Republic of Serbia, which was adopted in June 2018, namely to Articles 88a – 88d, which enable formalization of the inter-municipal cooperation in the area of DRR and management.  Additionally, the templates were developed for implementation of the new legal framework for inter-municipal cooperation and will be finalized in the coming months.

This regional meeting in Skopje “Sharing experience on models for Urban Resilience Action Networks in South-East Europe” served to present the case studies and best practices of SEE countries and territories, as well as from Armenia and Georgia.

At the end of the conference a Regional SEE Urban Declaration has been presented, adopted and disseminated.

For more information: www.seeurban.eu