The Spanish Association of Mountain Municipalities, established in 2013 at the initiative of a group of mayors of mountain areas and senators to unite the mountain municipalities of Spain, to claim their needs and promote legislative improvements and actions that contribute to improving the lives of their inhabitants, stopping the depopulation of these territories and generating economic and social development in these municipalities, was a beneficiary in the 2017 call for grants with the project “SOST-MONTAÑAS: Models for the sustainable management of ecosystem services in Spanish mountain regions”. The objective of this initiative is to identify sustainable models of community management of ecosystem services, implemented in the different Spanish mountain regions, which could be used as tools to improve their adaptation to the context of current environmental changes.

Within the framework of the project, the current state of rural and mountain areas was analysed and their future was projected articulated around ecosystem services as a driver of their sustainable development.