Santander is the venue where the meeting “Sustainability and environmental commitment of the Armed Forces in the European Union” is being held from today. Ana Leiva, director of the Biodiversity Foundation, takes part in the round table “Collaboration between the Ministry of Defence and the rest of the Public Administrations in Environmental Management”.

The table, moderated by the Director General of Infrastructure of the Ministry of Defence, and director of the meeting, Mónica Melle Hernández, will also be attended by the Minister of the Environment of the Junta de Andalucía, Juan José Díaz Trillo; the Director General of the Natural Environment and Forest Policy of the Ministry of the Environment and Rural and Marine Affairs, José Jiménez García-Herrera, and the President of the Group of Agricultural Transformation Companies, S.A. (Tragsa), María Luisa Graña Barcia.

The meeting “Sustainability and environmental commitment of the Armed Forces in the European Union” will be held from today until next Wednesday, June 23, at the Palacio de la Magdalena in Santander, and has been organized by the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP) with the collaboration of the Ministries of Education and Defence.

The forum seeks to disseminate environmental policies within the Armed Forces of the nations integrated in the European Union. In particular, the concept of sustainable Defence will be dealt with from a multilateral and multinational point of view, which includes the tools for coordinating the environmental policies of the Ministries of Defence of the EU nations with the proposals and legislation emanating from the European Commission, as well as the specific procedures for collaboration in the Spanish Public Administration between the Ministry of Defence and the rest of the aforementioned Administration.

“We believe that there are great ways of collaborating with the Armed Forces for the future. The fact that a significant percentage of the land used by the Ministry of Defence is located in protected areas, mainly in the Natura 2000 Network, illustrates the importance that the management of these farms has had for the biodiversity of our country, as a great reservoir of natural values”, said Ana Leiva within the framework of the meeting.

In this regard, in recent years there have been important advances in cooperation for nature conservation, such as the help that Defence is providing through the Military Emergency Units (UME) in firefighting, which has prevented the loss of thousands of hectares of the best ecosystems in our territory and is one of the great threats to biodiversity.

Among these cooperation resources, the Director of the Biodiversity Foundation has proposed land stewardship and reforestation, as two of the most important tools for the conservation of natural heritage and the fight against the effects of climate change.