After the bear walked into the urban zone of the city of Banja Luka in 2015 and after we questioned the decision to shoot him, we realized that a new era in species management had arrived. That’s when we started discussions, and after that we worked on processes such as advocating the establishment of intervention teams for the brown bear, drawing up management plans for this species, and genetic analysis, connecting with colleagues both in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region.
One of the important results of this work, for our society, is the first ever developed and officially adopted management plan for an animal species: the Brown Bear Management Plan in the Republic of Srpska.
The plan was made in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management of the Republic of Srpska (the Center and the Ministry signed a Memorandum of Cooperation and the Ministry officially appointed a working group for the preparation of this document). The process was supported through the project “Protection of brown bears in the area of the Dinarides” in cooperation with the partner foundation EuroNatur from Germany.
The process of creating this document lasted from 2020-2022, when at the end of 2022 the document was open for public inspection. At the beginning of 2023, the document was finalized, officially cataloged and published.
In March 2023, at the meeting of the Dinaric-Balkan-Pindos regional platform for large animals, held in Skopje (North Macedonia), we presented the newly adopted and published Brown Bear Management Plan in the Republic of Srpska.
This is the first brown bear management plan officially adopted in one of the countries of the Western Balkans, which are not members of the European Union.
We hope that the implementation will be as successful as the process of creating management plans in the FBiH and surrounding countries, because it is first of all important to observe the bear through the state of the entire population. We hope that this small contribution of ours will ensure the preservation of the Dinaric bear population as a whole.