The director of the Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment, Sonia Castañeda, today highlighted “the importance of implementing sustainability criteria that guarantee an efficient and sustainable use of natural resources”, during the opening table of the II International Forum on Ecological Restoration Creating Networks, which was held at La Casa Encendida in Madrid.
 
The objective of the meeting is to present the benefits of applying ecological restoration in the different industrial sectors, facilitate direct contact with scientists and experts in ecological restoration, create synergies that lead to the development of ecological restoration projects and provide new criteria to administrations and companies for the development of environmental strategies and policies based on the recovery of natural capital and services Ecosystem.
 
Sonia Castañeda recalled that the Biodiversity Foundation puts these values into practice through the Spanish Business and Biodiversity Initiative (IEEB) and supports examples of ecological restoration thanks to the projects presented by different entities to the calls for aid managed by the Foundation. In addition, the Foundation promotes citizen collaboration initiatives such as land stewardship actions or volunteer programs.

The Biodiversity Foundation has also participated in a public-private collaboration session in which it has continued with the preparation of the Eco-Restoration Guide, an initiative of the IEEB that was launched last October with the aim of creating an effective instrument for the conservation of natural capital and that will be available at the end of 2016.

The conference brought together companies, administrations and other prescribers in ecological restoration to discuss how to incorporate ecological functionality criteria into restoration actions associated with business activities and incorporate the conclusions into a Practical Guide to Eco-Restoration, which seeks to become a reference document and a useful tool for all parties involved.
 
In this session, the importance of reaching a consensus with the collaboration of all the agents involved was highlighted both for the design and execution of the document, as well as for its subsequent exploitation phase, to elucidate in common what guidelines could be applied for effective restoration in environmental, social and economic terms.