Gërmia Regional Nature Park — testing willingness-to-pay financing for Pristina's urban forest

Gërmia is a forested massif on Pristina's north-eastern edge; in 1987 the city's Municipal Assembly placed roughly 1,126 hectares under protection as a Regional Nature Park, later placed under the public enterprise "Hortikultura," and the site has grown into the capital's principal recreational green space.
A 2021 peer-reviewed contingent-valuation study (Doli et al., Sustainability, MDPI) surveyed 208 park visitors on their willingness to pay for the park's upkeep: 56% said they would pay a fee to fund sustainable management and development, while 44% were opposed, giving park managers a first quantified evidence base for (and against) introducing a paid-access or donation-based financing model.
Kosovo's own environmental literature flags Pristina's overall green-space provision as low relative to WHO guidance, so Gërmia functions less as a scaled, revenue-generating payments-for-ecosystem-services scheme than as a single, well-used protected asset whose long-term funding model is still unresolved — the willingness-to-pay finding is an evidence base rather than an implemented payment mechanism.

Read the full analysis: https://visitkosovo.rks-gov.net/page/germia