Barcelona, 19 June 2015
The event was inaugurated by Federico Ramos, Spain’s Secretary of State for the Environment; Qunli Han, Director of UNESCO’s Ecological and Earth Sciences Division; Juan Manuel de Barandica, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Spain to UNESCO; and Josep Maria Coronas, Secretary General of Abertis.
Also present at the ceremony were Miguel Clüsener-Godt, Chief of Section: MAB Research and Policy at UNESCO; Basilio Rada, head of Spain’s National Parks agency; Sergi Loughney, Director of the Abertis Foundation and of the UNESCO Centre; and Martí Boada, coordinator of the Centre.
The Mediterranean Network of Biosphere Reserves initially numbers 60 reserves in 14 countries: Algeria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, Spain, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Morocco, Montenegro, Portugal and Tunisia.
With the aim of presenting the Biosphere Reserves that will form part of the Mediterranean Network, a series of monographic works have been prepared that showcase the characteristics and value of each of these spaces in terms of their natural, landscape and cultural heritage.
To mark the establishment of the network, a debate was held entitled:The two coastlines of the Mediterranean, featuring Josep Roca, sommelier of the restaurant El Celler de Can Roca, Josefina Castellví, an oceanographer; Shlomo Ben Ami, Vice President of the Toledo International Center for Peace; and Munther Haddadin, the former Water and Irrigation minister of Jordan.
The debate provided a platform for the participants to express their personal and unique visions of the Mediterranean as a meeting place between southern Europe, northern Africa and western Asia, with richly diverse cultures and landscapes and a complex socio-political reality.
The event will continue this afternoon with a working session that will start with a keynote speech by Antonio Troya, a member of the Mediterranean Office of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (UICN), and then continue with the articulation and constitution of the Mediterranean Network of Biosphere Reserves via the approval and signing of the corresponding document by the managers and representatives of the MaB committees of UNESCO.
The second day of the event will take place tomorrow at the Montseny Biosphere Reserve. During a field visit, participants will have the opportunity to find out about a flagship space in terms of management, the unique biogeography of the massif and its cultural heritage elements, as well as successful new socio-economic activities that foster conservation of the landscape.
The debate on climate change is on the political and economic. Also His Holiness Pope Francis referred in a recent encyclical on Environment. In this sense Abertis, company chaired by Salvador Alemany and directed by CEO-Vice President Francisco Reynes, leads a model project between business, environmental and UNESCO, as is the UNESCO International Centre for Mediterranean Biosphere Reserves at the headquarters of the Abertis Foundation in Castellet castle. UNESCO’s Director-General Irina Bokova welcomed the first collaboration between UNESCO and a private company, in this case Abertis, at a recent meeting in Paris with the Spanish King and Queen.
UNESCO Centre on Mediterranean Biosphere Reserves
Castellet Castle (Castellet i la Gornal, Barcelona) was declared a UNESCO Centre on Mediterranean Biosphere Reserves on 14 November 2013 at the UNESCO General Conference in Paris and inaugurated on 5 April 2014. It is the first public-private initiative of its kind in this sphere.
Among the main strategic objectives of the UNESCO Centre are the forging of stronger relationships between the various Mediterranean Biosphere Reserves and the promotion of research on the main environmental themes at present on both coastlines of the Mediterranean.
It is a special category two centre and its primary objective is to achieve the strategic goals of the UNESCO MaB programme. These centres render, in their home and neighbouring countries, technical assistance in areas of UNESCO’s competence through capacity-building and training, research and the establishment of networks for the sharing of information and knowledge.
The Centre is based on a protocol signed by the Autonomous Authority for National Parks (Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment) and the Abertis Foundation, and enjoys the academic support of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB).
The World Network of Biosphere Reserves, coordinated by UNESCO’s MaB (Man and Biosphere) programme, are areas comprising terrestrial, marine and coastal ecosystems. Each reserve promotes solutions reconciling the conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable use.
Photos (Flickr)
Comments