An important meeting of the Georgian Ministry of Environment Protection and Agriculture was held recently. This was decided in the meeting that the areas of the Tusheti Protected Landscape will be increased by by 2245 hectares.
As per the details of this discussion it was stressed that to protect the natural resources of the country the establishment of the protected area as well as enhancement of existing protected areas of the is need of hour. This was also added by the attendee of the meeting that more initiative in this direction are required.
The meeting attendees also siad that regulations related to protected landscape management will also apply to the extended area, which will help to restore the historic appearance of the settlements there for two centuries.
They also added that as a result of the setting up of ecotourism infrastructure in this area, the number of visitors will increase. To promote biodiversity protection Georgian government has created 100 protected areas of different categories and their area which consists of more than 912 thousand hectares is about 13.1% of the country’s territory.
A governmnet representative stated further that ” The bill On Creation and Management of Guria National Park was presented to the Parliament of Georgia this year, studies will be carried out in the direction of establishment of protected areas in Samegrelo and Upper Svaneti and expansion of protected areas in Racha. We continue to develop ecotourism infrastructure in different parts of the country.
As per the additional information this year the establishment of 1,200 km long pedestrian paths and accompanying tourist-recreational infrastructure will be completed in 15 protected areas. More than one million GEL was allocated for this purpose. Also this year at least 10 l new ecotourism infrastructure will be created for which 10 million GEL will be spent.
As a result of the innovative development policy of protected areas last year 1070000 visitors visited to the protected areas of Georgia which is an increase of 19% compared to the data for 2022.
