The Participation Committee of the Land Stewardship Platform (PCT) held its annual meeting today at our headquarters in Madrid. During the session, the actions carried out by the Platform in 2018 were addressed and the work plan for this year was discussed, based on the main requirements of the custody movement in Spain.

The Land Stewardship Platform has been responding to the different needs of the land stewardship movement for 11 years, serving as a forum for meeting and disseminating all the activities of the movement.

During 2018, within the framework of the Environmental Volunteering Programme, we supported six entities for the development of land stewardship actions in different coastal demarcations and watersheds linked to the natural environment, wheremore than 3,700 volunteers were mobilised in 80 activities. Likewise, the Biodiversity Foundation supported 9 stewardship projects through its call for grants.

We also published the V Inventory of Land Stewardship Initiatives in Spain, which includes the total land area dedicated to stewardship, which amounts to 370,272 hectares (ha), in addition to 308,200 hectares of marine stewardship and 349,846 ha of hunting stewardship, which were not accounted for in previous inventories, given their particular nature; 166 entities involved in the almost 2,500 land stewardship agreements, which show a consolidation of these public-private agreements.

This year we will publish the VI Inventory of Land Stewardship Initiatives in Spain, one of the fundamental products of the Platform, and which constitutes the only source at the state level of information regarding stewardship entities and agreements, being a key instrument to analyse the status and trend of this nature conservation tool.

We will continue to work in the European land stewardship network with a clear long-term strategy and solid international allies, within the LIFE European Land Conservation Network project, of which we are partners. As part of this project, last year, we organised the International Workshop on Tax Incentives on Private Land, which was attended by representatives of the European Commission, more than 15 speakers and 40 participants from all over Europe and the United States. This forum allowed for the exchange of experiences, and the main barriers and opportunities of fiscal and non-fiscal incentives for the conservation of private lands were addressed.

At the PCT we continue to establish strategic alliances with relevant agents of society. In this sense, we have signed a collaboration agreement with the General Council of Notaries (CGN) in order to strengthen the legal security of custody and increase the confidence of the Administration’s own technicians and of society as a whole, and, soon we will do so with the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces, which has decided to fully commit to the stewardship of the territory from its Network of Local Governments + Biodiversity. In this sense, we have prepared with your collaboration a guide to promote this collaboration tool with local entities.

The PCT Participation Committee has had the participation of xx entities and the intervention of the president of the Spanish Network for Rural Development.