On 26 and 27 March, in Madrid, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment will host a workshop on the LIFE platform for the management of marine habitats, which will be attended by experts from around 40 LIFE+ projects on marine conservation, including the LIFE+ INDEMARES project, coordinated by the Ministry’s Biodiversity Foundation. and that has just ended.

During the opening of the workshop, the deputy director of the Biodiversity Foundation, Ignacio Torres, pointed out that the results of the LIFE+ INDEMARES project have been truly extraordinary, since thanks to this project it has been possible to declare 49 Natura 2000 marine areas, with a total area of more than 7 million hectares, achieving that Spain increases its marine protected area from less than 1 to more than 8 percent.

Torres also stated that for the Biodiversity Foundation, marine conservation and sustainable development have been key pieces over the last three years, not only because Spain is the second country in Europe in terms of marine area and the sea is an important economic resource, but also because it is home to important biodiversity that must be preserved.

The meeting, organised by the LIFE Programme and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for the Environment, precedes another seminar to be held at the beginning of May in Saint Malo (France), where experts from the Member States will launch the Natura 2000 biogeographical process for the marine environment.

The main objective of the Madrid meeting is to extract and compile the inputs of the LIFE programme for this process, in order to foster the creation of networks of experts and to facilitate coordinated regional actions. For two days, experts in the management of marine habitats will share experiences on their projects and share the best practices acquired.