International Mountain Day is celebrated on December 11. The Biodiversity Foundation supports initiatives that protect mountain areas.

Today, December 11, is International Mountain Day. It was in 2002 when the General Assembly of the United Nations declared this day that it wants to highlight the importance of mountains for life, in addition to pointing out the opportunities and challenges faced by mountain areas.
 
The mountains are a landscape rich in biodiversity and natural capital, and are home to numerous species of fauna and flora. Within the Natura 2000 Network, the European ecological network of biodiversity conservation areas, 50% is in mountain areas. As for Spain, 40% of the Spanish territory is mountainous.
 
The Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment collaborates in the development of various projects and initiatives that protect the biodiversity and ecosystems of mountainous areas. Thus, for example, the Global Change Monitoring Network in National Parks is an initiative for the collection and processing of data in situ, which allows the development of a system for evaluating and monitoring the impacts that may be generated in Spanish National Parks as a result of global change. The Network was launched thanks to an agreement between several organizations, including the Biodiversity Foundation, the Autonomous Organization of National Parks (OAPN), the Spanish Office for Climate Change (OECC) and the State Meteorological Agency (AEMET), with the collaboration of Ferrovial-Agromán. Four of the parks in the National Park Network – the Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park, the Aigüestortes National Park, the Sierra Nevada National Park and the Sierra de Guadarrama National Park – are parks in high mountain areas.
 
Within the framework of its call for grants, the Biodiversity Foundation supports various initiatives that are developed in mountain areas. Thus, in 2013 the University of Cordoba launched a project to study the effect of global change on snow and high mountain hydrology in the Sierra Nevada National Park. Within the 2014 call for grants, two projects were developed: one by the Rural Nature Association, with the aim of reintroducing the black vulture in the Pyrenees, and another by the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation, for the implementation of a biodiversity monitoring centre in Mediterranean mountains, with the aim of finding indicators of environmental change and establishing monitoring protocols.
 
During this year, several initiatives have also begun with the support of the Biodiversity Foundation, such as the Centinela project of the University of Cantabria, which seeks to evaluate the effects of global change on mountain river ecosystems. A university, in this case that of Cordoba, has also started a project that is being developed in the Sierra Nevada National Park, with which it is intended to find out the rates of torrential and aridity related to snow in the park and its bordering areas, in a context of global change. For its part, the University of Granada has designed and implemented an experimental platform for advanced visualization of the information contained in the Sierra Nevada Global Change Monitoring Observatory.
 
As for green entrepreneurship, the 2012 Red emprendeverde Awards, awards granted by the Red emprendeverde of the Biodiversity Foundation, recognized three years ago the work of the entrepreneurial initiative Agua de Niebla, a company that obtains pure water from the clouds in the Canary Islands in a sustainable and innovative way thanks to water gardens, some of which are located in mountain areas.