Periurban Parks and Outdoor Sports – a match made in heaven?

At the 7th Outdoor Sports Euro’Meet 2024, EUROPARC organised the workshop “Periurban Park Challenges and Innovative Solutions”. The event took place in beautiful LECCO, Lombardia, between the 10th and 12th of September 2024. Furthermore, an exciting new award was announced…

Background of the event

Outdoor Sports are an excellent way to connect people to nature. However, conflicts arise when sports are practised unsustainably, or when different users have conflicting interests. In 2018, EUROPARC signed a memorandum of understanding with ENOS, the European Network of Outdoor Sports, to tackle these challenges together. Fruitful cooperation has been ongoing since then with the development of a common project: the ERASMUS + SEE project and active participation in our mutual conferences.

As such, our colleague and expert on Sustainable Tourism, Outdoor Sports and Periurban Parks, Teresa Pastor was invited to take part in the 7th Euro-Meet. The event followed the theme: “Innovations in Outdoor Sports. Inspiring sustainable and active citizens”. Teresa provided a “Protected Area” lens by:

1. Conducting the workshop on “Periurban Park Challenges and Innovative Solutions.”

2. Participating in a round table moderated by Benjamin Billet on “Innovative ways to integrate environmental sustainability in the outdoors,” alongside Harmut Wimmer, Thomas Knights and Manon Carpenter.

3. Joined a panel discussion on the future “Launch of the ‘European Declaration on Trails” with Harmut Wimmer, Hans Stoops, Mike McClure, and Laura Suau.

Periurban Park Challenges and Innovative Solutions Workshop.

Tackling the conflict: Navigating the Intersection of Digital Tools, Conservation, and Stakeholder Management

The participatory workshop had the following aims:

1. Understanding the main differences in visit features and visitor profiles between remote Protected Areas and Periurban Parks and the associated management challenges and opportunities.
2. Further the thinking on how digital tools are changing the visitation patterns: What opportunities and challenges does this bring?

To set the scene, Teresa presented the Collserola Natural Park, a highly visited Park, located at the heart of the Greater Barcelona Region. Participants were then asked to think on expected differences between visitors of remote vs. Periurban Parks in terms of preferred seasonality, time of outdoor sport practice, origin of visitors, age, outdoor sports practice and group-size. This was followed by a short presentation on how the situation is in Collserola and a discussion on challenges and opportunities that arise from these visit profiles.

In general, outdoor sports visitors in Periurban Parks tend to be locals, going to the Park all year round, in high frequency. Their visiting times cover the whole day, including evenings. This high frequency, non-stop visitation threatens the natural assets. Furthermore, in Periurban Parks, two type of outdoor users share the space: those performing high speed activities (like trail running and biking) and those practicing slow activities (like hiking and walking). Walking is mostly done by senior people and families with young children. This high contrast in users and aims of the visits results in a high likelihood of conflict. However, as visitors are often local, this also means that there is potential to engage with them and work together in putting in place innovative management solutions.

Additionally, participants had to reflect on the benefits that IT tools (GPS based and outdoor sport apps) bring for users. These benefits include, knowing where they are, discovery of new trails and that they are cheap and easy to use, and how these relate with new management challenges and opportunities.

The low cost, easy to use, apps are helping new comers – from traditionally underrepresented groups, to ‘seek adventure’ in the outdoors. This contributes towards a healthier population. However, this increases issues with visitor managers for Park Managers: more people, going everywhere, at any time. However, this new technology can also be part of the solution as it can help managers to get to know visitors better – where they go, when, in a group or alone, gender, etc. This information is essential to plan the trails and other infrastructure better.

The workshop was a perfect venue to discuss different ideas in favour of a better accommodation of Outdoor Sports in Periurban Parks.

A new award

To deepen the relationship between Outdoor Sports and Protected Areas, as well as to highlight best practices, ENOS and EUROPARC are excited to launch a new award! It will recognise outstanding initiatives in the field of outdoor sports & nature restoration. More information will follow soon, so stay tuned!

Want to know more?

If you are interested in further outcomes of the events, as well as other presentations, will be made available on the webpage here.