High Tatra—The Challenges of Natural Disaster Recovery and Complex Changes - Impact of Global Changes on Mountains: Responses and Adaptation - page 373

supportive public infrastructure such as transport infrastructure and water
supply systems, etc. However these projects are often in contrast with the
real market demand and interest of the protection of natural and cultural
values of the area. This is a result of being placed in the context where the
former socialistic regime eroded principles of environmental protection
by ideological legacy and the absence of the market allowed states to be
the only regulatory body, often resulting in a de facto open access resource
regime (Kluvánková-Oravská et al. 2009). Implementation of the market
into the environmental protection in such context creates a number of
sectoral coordination problems.
At fi rst weak economic potential at local level has been a challenge
for powerfull investors, who are capable of interacting with communal
decision making but following their own interests only. A typical example
is the expansion of skiing resorts, where the economics of skiing in the High
Tatras is rather poor, especially as the variability of the snow fall necessitates
the production of artifi cial snow and existing services are not competitive
in the market (Beták et al. 2005). It is assumed that societal costs of such
projects would dramatically exceed possible benefi ts in the public sphere,
such as water regime biodiversity and landscape quality or provision of
drinking water for the Vysoke Tatry (High Tatras) County.
This situation gave rise to the pressure to develop and to approve
new land-use documentation for the High Tatras County. The existence
of the regulative document based on the multilateral consensus about the
harmonization of different interests in the space is especially important
for the areas with outstanding natural and cultural values. The lack of up-
dated version of such documents since 1999 was used as the argument in
the discussions regarding the frameworks for its approval in 2010 before the
existence of new zonation refl ecting the outputs from the recovery strategy
after the disaster in 2004. The land-use plan defi nes the proportion of
greenery in built-up areas, the density, character and other parameters of the
built-up structures, addresses the traffi c situation and defi nes functional use
of land. Only on the basis of a land-use plan at the municipal level there is
the possibility to extend the built-up area boundaries beyond current limits.
The critics of the civic and environmental activists expressed their
apprehensions regarding the not properly limited developments of multi-
storey apartment houses, open possibilities for the limit-less decisions of the
developers, the change of rural mountain character of the settlements and
extensive development of sports infrastructure outside the built-up areas.
The elaborated land-use plan proposal, based on a study from 1999,
could mirror only a set of older documents, e.g., the defi nition of three
zones following the designation of the Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO: core,
buffer and transition. These are not adequate as the buffer zone throughout