Menorcan landscape

The Mediterranean Programme for Landscape Culture meet in Menorca

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The Mava Foundation promotes a programme of work in different places in the Mediterranean for preserving those cultural practices that help in conserving nature´s values. Menorca is included with its agricultural land stewardship agreements made with GOB and in the next few days the island is hosting a meeting coordinating all the areas involved in piloting this scheme.

Human communities and their interactions with the environment have, throughout history, developed cultural practices which, until not so long ago, were highly sustainable. Many people are now working to be able to maintain and renew these systems of management.

Representatives of organisations that work with meadows and mountains to the west of the Peninsula, in areas of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, the Reserve of the Biosphere of the Schouf of Lebanon, and the Greek Island of Lemnos, are meeting in Menorca with different international experts to study their procedures and methods in depth.

The network of farms with Land Stewardship agreements promoted by GOB in Menorca form part of this international initiative. In these farms measures are applied that have been shown to be useful in other places and they work with experiments in the recovery of land fertility, maintenance of biodiversity, product diversification and marketing improvements, etc.

The meeting will be during the next few days and the island will serve to review implementation and progress from results obtained from the projects combined with the evaluation process made by the Programme for Landscape Culture. Also, the participants will be able to have a better knowledge of other aspects of Menorca and see some cases in practice.

The Mava Foundation was created by Luc Hoffman, one of the pioneers of international conservation who made positive actions on preservation of places like the Doñana in Spain or the French Camargue, who helped to promote organisations like the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) or the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and who was committed to having regulations without frontiers, such as those of the International Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.

It is very pleasing for GOB that Menorca has been able to be part of the programme for Landscape Culture of the Mava Foundation and for the island to have been chosen for this international meeting.