WHY ECOIMPACT

The action is motivated by rapidly growing urbanisation, deterioration of environment, and climate change, which make people, organisations and businesses ever more vulnerable to environmental impacts. Since 2009, the world has become more urban than rural: the number of people living in urban areas had surpassed the number of rural dwellers. Urban agglomerations, rapidly growing in size and number, form artificial environments with nature and properties poorly comprehended by the society. With increasing complexity and heterogeneity of urban infrastructure, modern life and economy progressively depend on local weather, air/water/soil quality and microclimate. These comprise “personal environments”, controlled by physical and chemical processes in the lower, essentially turbulent atmospheric planetary boundary layer, directly interacting with the Earth’s surface and affected by industrial emissions, air/water/soilpollution, and anthropogenic warming. However, managers in weather-sensitive sectors of economy, not to mention wide public, often do not possess sufficient knowledge about local environment and its impacts on their activities. The consequent damage and lost profit due to non-optimal management decisions are already large and, if ignored, will inevitably become systematic. ECOIMPACT aims at contributing to modernisation of environmental education in order to change the situation.