The General Directorate of Water and the Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment (MAGRAMA) held this morning the meeting “Volunteering in Rivers and Biodiversity 2013”, to encourage civil society to get involved in the conservation and improvement of rivers.

The general director of Water, Liana Ardiles, and the director of the Biodiversity Foundation, Sonia Castañeda, have inaugurated this day that has informed fifty organizations present of the possibilities of collaboration that exist within the framework of the Volunteering Program in Rivers through the different calls of the Biodiversity Foundation, opening a space for dialogue.

The objective of the Volunteering in Rivers Program is to encourage the participation of citizens in the shared management of water, promoting volunteering in the conservation and improvement of the ecological status of rivers in the different hydrographic basins managed by the Ministry through the Hydrographic Confederations.

At the event, held at the Ministry’s headquarters on Gran Vía in San Francisco (Madrid), the Director General of Water highlighted the role of the administrations “to encourage and encourage citizens to get involved in the management of a service as essential for life and the environment as water”.

The director of the Biodiversity Foundation, for her part, stressed that “society is increasingly aware of the importance of aquatic ecosystems and, through the calls of the Biodiversity Foundation, the work carried out so far is continued.

The call for grants, whose deadline for submitting proposals ends on July 15, includes a specific program to support volunteering in rivers. Likewise, within the framework of the Beaches, Volunteering and Stewardship Programme, whose call is open until mid-June, river stewardship has been included this year as a novelty.

This program seeks to have a stable network of volunteers in inter-community watersheds linked to the restoration of forests and rivers. Within the National Strategy for River Restoration, the project seeks to recover the environmental quality of riverbeds, as well as to serve as an instrument for raising awareness.

Since the beginning of the Volunteering Program in Ríos, more than 100 volunteer projects have been carried out throughout Spain, in which nearly 170,000 people have participated through more than 100 associations of very different origin and typology.