The Biodiversity Foundation participates in the seventh edition of the State Conference on Land Stewardship, which is held in Valencia.

Today we participate in the seventh edition of the State Conference on Land Stewardship, which takes place from November 8 to 10 in Valencia, under the slogan “One more step in the consolidation of participatory nature conservation”. The conference is organised by the Forum of Networks and Entities of Land Stewardship (FRECT), Avinença (Valencian Association of Custodians and Responsible Management of the Territory), the Generalitat Valenciana and the Provincial Council of Valencia. An event that serves as a meeting and reflection point between networks, entities and actors involved in land stewardship, as well as being a forum open to the participation of other social and economic agents linked to this conservation strategy.

The deputy director of the Biodiversity Foundation, Ignacio Torres, inaugurated the conference, and stressed that “this movement has established itself as a strong network of social fabric, essential to improve the state of biodiversity and ecosystems in Spain“. Torres, who recalled the celebration in 2018 of the twentieth anniversary of the Biodiversity Foundation, “two decades in which we have supported almost 2,000 projects and granted more than 230 million euros between calls for aid, agreements or scholarships”, added that the central axis of action of many of these projects has been the stewardship of the territory. Likewise, this conservation tool has been key in some of his own projects.

The Land Stewardship Platform, coordinated by the Biodiversity Foundation, is an initiative that has been responding, for eleven years, to the different needs of the land stewardship movement, serving as a meeting point and dissemination of all the activities of the movement. One of its key products is the Inventory of Land Stewardship Initiatives in Spain, the fifth edition of which has been published this year, and which collects information on the surface area, number of entities and agreements established for conservation. It offers a detailed interactive map of the custody and participation of communal entities, as well as a disaggregated treatment of the custody exercised by hunting entities.

Thisinventory has included a total land area dedicated to land stewardship in Spain of 370,272 hectares (ha), in addition to 308,200 ha of marine stewardship and 349,846 ha of hunting stewardship, which are not accounted for in previous inventories, given their particular nature. During this year, a total of 166 entities involved in almost 2,500 land stewardship agreements have been counted, which show a consolidation of these voluntary agreements.

The Conference has had a round table on “The involvement of civil society in nature conservation”. Afterwards, various technical communications will be presented and different debates will be held within the framework of working groups, thus giving continuity to the proposal of the sixth edition of the conference, held in 2016.

The working groups will address different issues of strategic importance for stewardship, such as the role of Public Administrations in this conservation strategy, the role of stewardship entities as part of the environmental third sector or land stewardship and the Common Agricultural Policy, among other topics. With the conclusions of the work of the groups, the roadmap for land stewardship will be designed.

To close the conference, on Saturday 10 the participants will learn about several initiatives for land stewardship during the scheduled field trip to the Albufera de Valencia and its surroundings. This end point to the conference will serve to show the work carried out thanks to the custody agreements of the Tancat de la Pipa, La Costera de Puçol and La Partida de l’Estell.

Do you want to know how the Biodiversity Foundation supports land stewardship? Check here the work of the Biodiversity Foundation in the field of land stewardship and find out what the Land Stewardship Platform, which is coordinated by the Foundation, does.