The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment, through the Biodiversity Foundation, has reaffirmed today, on the occasion of the inauguration of the First European Congress on Land Stewardship, its commitment to the development of this conservation tool, in which it has invested more than 2.1 million euros in this legislature.
 
The director of the Biodiversity Foundation, Sonia Castañeda, inaugurated these conferences by highlighting the value of land stewardship as a “complementary protection strategy of great interest due to its participatory and voluntary nature“, as well as its ability to involve private owners and other public and private organisations, also highlighting “the great development that this protection measure has undergone in recent years”.
 
The First European Congress on Land Stewardship held in Barcelona will last three days (until 8 November), has 232 registered and 19 countries and 134 entities are participating in it. The Ministry, through the Biodiversity Foundation, will participate in the opening of the Conference and the Congress, in addition to organizing two workshops on November 6 and 7: “Main instruments to finance land stewardship initiatives” and “European Land Stewardship Network”. Likewise, during the Congress and the Conference, the Ministry will exhibit informative material on land stewardship in Spain.

With a history of 40 years in Spain, land stewardship is a nature conservation strategy based on the whole of our territory. In these decades, an effort has been made by the different actors involved in land stewardship. The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment has integrated land stewardship into various policies through its inclusion in the Natural Heritage and Biodiversity Law and the Strategic Plan that develops it. Likewise, the public-private agreement models also contemplate actions in the field of land stewardship, as is the case with those carried out in the Public Hydraulic Domain.
 
In addition, the Ministry, through the Biodiversity Foundation, coordinates the “Land Stewardship Platform“, which is a meeting forum for the sector. With unprecedented work in the European context, the “Land Stewardship Platform” collects data at the national level, develops technical studies and disseminates the concept of land stewardship while acting as an interlocutor between the entities of the sector and the Public Administrations.
 
On the other hand, the III Inventory of Land Stewardship Initiatives of the Spanish State, prepared by the Biodiversity Foundation, reflects that in Spain more than 650,000 hectares have stewardship agreements, and that there are 190 active stewardship entities, 9 regional networks and almost 2,000 registered agreements.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment, through the Biodiversity Foundation, has been promoting land stewardship for 10 years through several lines of action. Since 2012, it has allocated more than 2.1 million euros to projects that work for land stewardship.
 
Through the Biodiversity Foundation’s call for grants, 1.6 million euros have been committed since 2012 for land stewardship projects. Also since that year, 130,000 euros have been allocated to the development of the Land Stewardship Platform and another 400,000 euros to projects such as the LIFE+ Cantabrian Capercaillie or the “Beaches, Rivers, Volunteering and Land Stewardship” program.