By signing the Stabilisation and Association Agreement, Croatia accepted the EU standards of environmental protection. With this Agreement, Croatia and the EU committed themselves to cooperate in fighting the destruction of the environment and to promote its sustainability.

The Agreement stresses protection from natural disasters to ensure the protection of people, animals, property, and environment from disasters caused by human action. The LIFE programme is devoted to the development and implementation of the EU environmental protection policy with an emphasis on the promotion of sustainable development.

Sustainable development is a complex term which includes the environmental protection component, the social component, and the economic component. The idea of sustainable development was created by linking the different impacts of production and development to the inevitable influence on the broader environment.

Our basic motto is not to stop development, but to find ways of development that will not threaten the environment, and to emphasise the significance of the social factor by improving the conditions of life. The task is very complex because, at first glance, these are contradictory terms. However, this is not completely true since the aim is to find solutions which would not threaten the conditions of life, in which environmental protection is a significant factor.