An international conference on large carnivores was held at the Ministry of Environment and Water (MOEW). This is the fifth meeting of the Dinaric-Balkan-Pindos Large Carnivore Platform #DiBaPi, organised in Sofia on 11-13 June.

The main theme of the forum was to discuss and exchange best practices for large carnivore conservation and conflict mitigation in human coexistence with iconic species, such as brown bear, wolf, and lynx. Representatives of institutions, universities, scientific and non-governmental organizations from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Bulgaria participated. Organisers of the international meeting were the Ministry of Environment and the Executive Forestry Agency (EFA) under the Ministry of Agriculture and Food.

The talks were joined by Viktor Atanasov, Deputy Minister of Environment and Water, eng. Rosen Raychev, Deputy Executive Director of the EFA, representatives of the EU Platform for Coexistence between Humans and Large Carnivores, the Secretariat of the Bern Convention, the Union of Hunters and Fishermen in Bulgaria, WWF Adria, WWF Bulgaria, the Alpine and Carpathian Conventions.

In addition to the two-day meeting, a field visit to the Vitosha Nature Park was also conducted, where experts from the EFA presented best practices in wildlife management, as well as the related problems and obstacles.

The platform is a tool for long-term exchanges in transboundary management and monitoring of large carnivores with representatives of national and regional authorities, as well as all stakeholders in this part of Europe.

The event is part of a series of events under a project funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment in cooperation with the German Federal Environment Agency. The main objective of the project is to build a regional mechanism for the management and monitoring of large carnivores with representatives of national and regional authorities as well as all stakeholders in this part of Europe.