High Tatra—The Challenges of Natural Disaster Recovery and Complex Changes - Impact of Global Changes on Mountains: Responses and Adaptation - page 367

of nature conservation in Slovakia could be characterized by traditional
approaches, with static conservation of ecological values. Its implementation
has had a rather negative impact on the stability of valuable ecosystems in
certain cases, especially in semi natural or cultural ecosystems requiring
active management.
Traditional state environmental policy concerned mostly human health
and was largely fragmented and administrated by forest and agriculture
authorities. Signifi cant improvement in the general public approach to
nature and environment protection in Slovakia has been prevalent after the
velvet revolution in 1989. The most important driver of this improvement
has been establishment of environmental administration in 1995 and EU
integration, in particular the implementation of EU Framework directives
in nature conservation. Hovewer, not all aspects can be seen in a purely
positive way. The biodiversity governance in Slovakia is subordinated to
regional administrations and state nature conservancy, which lack adequate
coordination of competencies and tasks. Participation of non state actors
on planning and decision making is also a challenge as the absence of an
accountability mechanism and practice for non-representative participation
is prevalent (Kluvánková-Oravská et al. 2009). Involvement of land
owners, land-users of protected land on decision making and protection
of the ecosystems and natural disasters prevention strategies is missing,
despite the increasing pressure of global climate change that would require
coordination of competences and implementation of prevention measures.
As reported in The Fourth National Communication of the Slovak
Republic on Climate Change (Szemesova et al. 2007), the average annual
temperature of the air increased by about 1.1°C in Slovakia in the last
century and the precipitation decreased by about 5.6%. As reported in this
document there was a rapid decrease of more than 10% of total precipitation
in southern Slovakia and on the other hand the increase up to 3%, in the
north and northeast of Slovakia were documented. A signifi cant decrease in
the relative humidity of the air of up to 5% and a decrease in snow coverage
over the whole territory were recorded. Recently a signifi cant increase of
local weather extreme events like local heavy rains and thunderstorms
with high daily precitation volume and strong winds have been observed,
bringing higher risks of local fl oods, buildings and forest destructions, etc.
Local and regional droughts caused by long periods of relatively warm
weather have been recorded in last two decades. The spruce ecosystems
have been infl uenced by the bark beetle expansion as well as fi res caused
by extremely hot and dry periods (Szemesova et al. 2007).
The High Tatras mountains are one of the smallest alpine range in the
world, nevertheless, they are the highest and the only mountain range of
alpine system in the Slovak Republic, and the highest part of the Carpathians
stretching in a large bow-shape from Vienna-Bratislava metropolitan region