Mountain areas are indispensable to preserve biodiversity and to develop a sustainable and resilient environment. These regions provide several ecosystem services to all European’s citizens such as quality food and fresh water as well as having the role of carbon sinks. However, mountains are facing many of the challenges of our century: from the alarming impacts of climate change to depopulation and ageing.
In order to address these challenges and become places of innovation and attractiveness, their inhabitants have relied on their creativity to innovate, accelerate climate mitigation and adaptation, support tourism, foster youth and employment, and enhance mobility.
The European Union has contributed to make this real through the funds of the Cohesion Policy. But what are the objectives and activities supported by this Fund? How can the Cohesion Policy be used to finance projects in the mountains over the 2021-2027 period?
To answer these questions, the European-funded Montana174 project has published a set of educational factsheets illustrating the resources that the 2021-2027 Cohesion Policy will channel in mountain areas via the Operational Programmes as well as Interreg Programmes.
The factsheets are divided in two groups: (i) regionally and (ii) thematically. In relation to the regional level, there are 5 factsheets discovering the priorities and how to benefit from the current Cohesion Policy in regions such as Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (France), Aragon (Spain), Lombardy (Italy), Croatia and Slovenia.
Besides that, the topics to address in these factsheets are the following and are available in different languages:
- Social and digital innovation
- Climate change adaptation and mitigation
- Tourism
- Youth & Employment
- Mobility
The coordinator of Montana174, Euromontana, believes the 2021-2027 Cohesion Policy is a huge opportunity for mountain regions and calls on mountain stakeholders to take advantage of these funds to meet the challenges of European regions. To this end, between April and July 2022 Montana174 will organise a series of local workshops to prepare mountain stakeholders to uptake these funds.