The Director General of Biodiversity, Forests and Desertification of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), Jorge Marquínez, today chaired the meeting of the participation committee of the Land Stewardship Platform, a tool coordinated by the Biodiversity Foundation.
The Land Stewardship Platform (PCT) acts as a meeting place for all land stewardship networks and entities, providing them with support and promoting their work in this line. The Platform aims to contribute to the common objective of promoting the implementation of this conservation strategy in Spain and to this end it assumes participation as an essential feature for its successful achievement.
This committee, made up of almost 30 members, including entities and people linked to the stewardship and other agents related to the management of the territory, serves as an advisory body to guide the actions of the Platform based on the main requirements of the stewardship movement.
This meeting, in which 36 representatives of 26 organizations participated, focused on strengthening the objectives and functions of the PCT, attending to the main present and future needs of the land stewardship group in Spain. Thus, progress has been made in the programme of actions to be developed to strengthen land stewardship, including a process of participation in the White Paper for the strengthening of land stewardship, the publication of a didactic document with possible contractual formulas with the Administration, and the organisation of training sessions to improve training between public sector workers and organisations in the environmental sector.
The Director General of Biodiversity, Forests and Desertification, Jorge Marquínez, stressed that “in this current context of health and economic crisis, the path that will guarantee reconstruction with a solid foundation is green recovery”.
“For this reason, the Government promotes a sustainable model that promotes the recovery of biodiversity, the restoration of ecosystems, as well as nature-based solutions. Among these priorities, land stewardship is an important tool for nature conservation that also contributes to facing the demographic challenge by generating employment and fixing population in rural areas,” said Marquínez.
A KEY TOOL FOR CONSERVING BIODIVERSITY
Land stewardship has established itself as a strong network of social fabric, essential to improve the state of biodiversity and ecosystems in Spain. The Law on Natural Heritage and Biodiversity, as well as the State Strategic Plan for Natural Heritage and Biodiversity, configure its legal framework and highlight its importance as a conservation tool to value the social function of biodiversity, in addition to entrusting public administrations with the responsibility of promoting it.
The Biodiversity Foundation of MITECO publishes, every two years, the Inventory of Land Stewardship initiatives in Spain. The latest edition of this report reveals that there are 3,100 stewardship agreements signed, led by 218 entities working on 578,000 hectares, of which almost half are in the Natura 2000 Network. Among the main novelties of this inventory are the increase in the total number of entities involved, the notable growth of custody in the Canary Islands and the reactivation of custody in the Balearic archipelago or the incorporation of a considerable number of urban custody initiatives, among others.
Over the last few years, the Biodiversity Foundation has supported more than 80 projects that have had land stewardship as their central axis of action. They have been supported through calls for grants, from European projects such as LIFE ELCN, LIFE Cantabrian Capercaillie and LIFE INTEMARES, and through the Environmental Volunteering Programme.
The results of these initiatives form the knowledge base for the improvement of this conservation tool as an effective instrument for the conservation of natural heritage within the framework of public policies.
