The EU Water Framework Directive aims to ensure restoration of Europe’s water bodies to “good ecological status” by 2027. Many Member States will struggle to meet this target, with around half of EU river catchments currently reporting below standard water quality. Diffuse pollution from agriculture represents a major pressure, affecting over 90% of river basins. Accumulating evidence shows that recent improvements to agricultural practices are benefiting water quality but in many cases will be insufficient to achieve WFD objectives. There is growing support for land use change to help bridge the gap, with a particular focus on targeted tree planting to intercept and reduce the delivery of diffuse pollutants to water. This form of integrated catchment management offers multiple benefits to society but a significant cost to landowners and managers. New economic instruments, in combination with spatial targeting, need to be developed to ensure cost effective solutions – including tree planting for water benefits - are realised. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are flexible, incentive-based mechanisms that could play an important role in promoting land use change to deliver water quality targets. The PESFOR-W COST Action will consolidate learning from existing woodlands for water PES schemes in Europe and help standardize approaches to evaluating the environmental effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of woodland measures. It will also create a European network through which PES schemes can be facilitated, extended and improved, for example by incorporating other ecosystem services linking with aims of the wider forests-carbon policy nexus.
The first part of the paper, regards to some socio-demographic determinants of households. They represent substantial indicators of the overall condition of a community. As a social element, are determined by the characteristics of the population that is the basic entity of observation in them. Status and trends of socio-demographic characteristics of households in Serbia in recent decades is the result of numerous factors. General decline in populationdepopulation, migration to the city, crumbling of properties, decrease of family and marriage importance, marriage in later years, changes in structure of the households in terms of division on agricultural, non-agricultural, mixed, etc. are just a few of the causes that determine the current state and movement of sociodemographic characteristics of households in Serbia.In second part of the paper the authors point to potentials of rural areas as important factors for rural development are present. Potentials in regions and some areas are unfavourable which slows down the development of rural areas. In the previous period, trends of uneven and unbalanced rural development are present. The differences in the rural development of the region and the country are obvious. It is therefore necessary to reduce of differences in the level of development in which a special role is played by the household.
In very short time big changes occurred in the agrarian structure, the structure of the population, territorial and socio-economical deployment. According to that, there is an obvious discontinuity in the development of rural areas. Pointing out the resources of the region during transformation and rapid development of agriculture, rural development and development of rural regions. The largest part of the development potential based on resource utilization is precisely located in the northern region of Montenegro. The basic method used in this paper is descriptive statistics applied to the collection of relevant data resources of the region, document analysis, comparison and synthesis. The signi icant changes in socio-demographics appeared, an increasing part of the elders and the decreasing of the youth, and decreasing the part of the agricultural population. The main leading factors of the development of agriculture and rural development are the family farms in the region, which is about 26.000 and the resources of land, livestock, and labor. The speci icity of the region is re lected in the changing structure of the agricultural population, socioeconomic , demographic, territorial distribution of the population, and migration. The signi icant differences in the development of agriculture and rural development in the region are also present. Resources are not fully utilized in order to reduce the differences in the development of the region and to accelerate the development of less developed areas. Also, the regional development of the areas is needed for measures and program of balanced development of local self-government.
Depopulation of rural areas as a global process has not bypassed our country either. Demographic changes in the structure of the population have especially affected the rural population and the village in our society. Depopulation of a number of villages, especially in South-eastern Serbia, means that some villages are almost empty or with older people and a minor share of young people. The aim of this paper is to analyze the availability of services, social participation contents and the quality of infrastructure in rural settlements. Therefore, the research was conducted on the basis of a survey questionnaire in 176 rural settlements in the municipalities of Bojnik, Crna Trava, Medveđa, Surdulica and Trgovište. The findings indicate the extent to which negative indicators of the number of inhabitants in rural settlements are related to available services, social participation contents and infrastructure based on the correlation analysis.
The share of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is largely present in forestry, especially in the segment related to non-wood forest products (NWFPs) in Europe. They are also a dominant category in entrepreneurship in Serbia. Therefore, the subjects of this research were the companies operating in the sector of NWFPs, within specific statistical regions of Serbia. The database of SMEs was obtained from 119 SMEs and the share of surveyed SMEs was 81.5%. The main research method was two-step cluster analysis. Questionnaire was used for the purpose of the research. The aim of the research was to identify clusters in order to establish similarities within the defined clusters and the differences among them. Spatial distribution of specific categories of NWFPs in nature (mushrooms, medicinal and aromatic plants, honey and wild berries), contributed to the portfolio of the companies. This largely influenced clusters that are created by categories of products that are typical for certain statistical regions in Serbia.
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