The Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment has participated, in Alicante, in the seminar “The importance of a healthy ocean for the economy and people’s well-being”, organized by WWF within the framework of the Volvo Ocean Race.

This meeting will be the first of those that WWF, together with the government of Sweden and the Volvo Ocean Race, will organize throughout the different stops of the race. The Volvo Ocean Race, which kicks off the 12th edition in Alicante, is the most important international team round the world sailing race.

During the seminar, the importance that projects such as LIFE+ INDEMARES have for the health of marine ecosystems was discussed. Coordinated by the Biodiversity Foundation, INDEMARES has had as its main objective to identify and designate places of high ecological value to comply with European regulations, contributing to achieving a good environmental status, allowing the sustainable development of the activities that take place in this environment.

The actions of the project have been aimed at alleviating this lack of scientific information, assessing and quantifying the impacts of human activities and raising awareness among the population about the importance of our seas, in order to propose the most ambitious and consensual Natura 2000 Network in Europe.

To achieve these objectives, more than 40 actions have been carried out, aimed at obtaining the necessary information, both scientific and socio-economic, with more than 120 oceanographic campaigns to, in a second phase, analyse the results in a coherent way and allow, through public participation, the development of the management guidelines of the Natura 2000 Network and the designation of spaces in this European ecological network.
INDEMARES has integrated the work of leading institutions in the field of management, research and conservation of the marine environment. The Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment has coordinated a multidisciplinary team in which 300 people from the Ministry itself, the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, the Spanish National Research Council, ALNITAK, the Coordinator for the Study of Marine Mammals, OCEANA, the Society for the Study of Cetaceans in the Canary Islands, have participated directly. SEO/BirdLife and WWF Spain and many other entities such as the universities of Malaga, Autónoma de Madrid and Barcelona.