Hainburg/Donau-Auen National Park in Austria hosted the Little Sydney: Protecting Nature in Europe conference, held from 28-31 May 2015. The event was organised by IUCN and the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) in collaboration with the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management. It built on the outcomes of the IUCN World Parks Congress, held in Sydney, Australia in November 2014. More than 200 participants from over 35 countries attended the conference and explored further the World Parks Congress’ outcomes of particular relevance for Europe.

With regards to transboundary conservation, the Little Sydney conference launched the IUCN WCPA Best Practice Guidelines No. 23, Transboundary Conservation: A systematic and integrated approach. Chair of WCPA Transboundary Conservation Specialist Group, Maja Vasilijević, held a presentation during a plenary session, presenting the Guidelines and its contents. The first printed copies of the book were also distributed during the event.

EUROPARC Federation organised a workshop titled Transboundary parks: not only to understand each other, but to cooperate, chaired by Jakub Kašpar and Handrij Härtel from EUROPARC Central and Eastern Europe. The workshop resulted with concrete action points to forward transboundary conservation in Europe.

An interesting workshop related to transboundary conservation was organised by UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre Inclusion of biodiversity conservation at land- and seascape levels into global database. Marcelo Goncalves Lima and Nina Bohla (both from UNEP-WCMC) presented its current project on mapping the connectivity conservation areas, while Maja Vasilijević presented the current situation regarding the assessment of Transboundary Conservation Areas and the need to create a comprehensive and sound new database.

A full report on Little Sydney will be available by mid-July 2015. More information is available here.