TheBBVA Foundation presents its Biodiversity Conservation Awards

The BBVA Foundation Awards for Biodiversity Conservation honor projects using knowledge as a springboard for action

  • Asociación Trashumancia y Naturalezaisrecognized for its work in Spain on behalf of transhumance and extensive farming. Over the space of two decades, the Association has overseen the return to transhumance of some200,000 sheep, goats, cows and horses using the traditional network of drovers’ roads.
  • TheSmithsonian Tropical Research Institutein Panama wins an award for its program to combat amphibian extinctionby establishing captive breeding coloniesfrom which individual animals can later be reintroduced into the wild.
  • The Award for Knowledge Dissemination and Communication in Biodiversity Conservationgoes to journalistJavier Gregori,in charge of environmental reporting with radio broadcaster Cadena SER.

Madrid, November 25, 2014.- Two projects addressing serious global problems, like the decline of amphibianpopulations or changes in livestock farming practices, take the accolades in the latest edition of the BBVA Foundation Awards for Biodiversity Conservation, presentedtoday in the Foundation’s Madrid headquarters.

Asociación Trashumancia y Naturaleza receives the 2013 Award for Biodiversity Conservation Projects in Spain for two decades of work on behalf of transhumance and extensive farming,which has helped to “maintain numerous natural habitats that would otherwise be degraded or lost,” according to the prize jury.

In the category of Biodiversity Conservation Projects in Latin America,the winner is the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, for its achievements in combating amphibian extinctions through “a ground-breaking project of great scientific solvency that combines preservation in captivity and investigation in field and laboratory, whose results can be applied in other parts of the world.”

In Knowledge Dissemination and Communication in Biodiversity Conservation the award goes to journalistJavier Gregori: “Among the most influential figures in environmental reporting,”in the words of the citation, as well as“exemplary in his ability to combine scientific rigor with a considered attention to environmental challenges.” The jury also stressed the importance of his role“at a time when the space devoted to scientific and environmental matters in the general media is visibly declining.”

The award ceremony, addressed by the President of the BBVA Foundation, Francisco González, brought together eminent members of the scientific community and environmental conservation organizations, as well as senior representatives from different branches of government, and specialists in environmental communication.

Established in 2004, the BBVA Foundation Awards for Biodiversity Conservation distinguish organizations carrying forward environmental conservation programs in Spain and Latin America, along with communicators whose work has contributed to the protection of our natural heritage. Their three categories carry a total cash prize of 580,000 euros.

Francisco González stressed the “urgency” of acting to protect nature by translating new knowledge into practical initiatives on the ground: “We share the view that knowledge, science and technology are a vital means to advance towards a better future, with a healthier natural environment. But we must add to this the resolve to implement what we have learned and find here-and-now solutions tospecific problems. It is imperative, in other words, to combine large-scale solutions with others geared to our local world.”

“Today’s big challenges call for an ambitious vision, free of prejudgments, that can see and apply solutions wherever they may lie: in tradition, in values, in technological progress or, perhaps most of all, in the synergies between these elements,” González continued. “Help in fighting climate change, biodiversity decline and the abandonment of rural life may well come from centennial practices underpinned and enhanced by the technology and knowledge of the 21st century.”

Asociación Trashumancia y Naturaleza

Jesús Garzón, founder of Asociación Trashumancia y Naturaleza, gave thanks to “the transhumant familieswho have made this project possible over the years. In this time, they have covered almost 70,000 km of drover’s roads, tracks and lanesin all of Spain with more than 250,000 sheep, goats, cows, donkeys and horses, enduring long spring days and long nights in autumn, frequently in suffocating heat or bitter cold, through storms, snowfalls and torrential rain.”

Hestressed the importance of transhumance “to conserve a shared heritage that is unique in the worldby protecting and fostering biological diversity and the millennial rights of our country’s farmers, so they can move and graze their animals freely throughout Spain.”

Since it was founded in 1997, Asociación Trashumancia y Naturaleza has sought to promote transhumance as a model of farming that helps protect the natural environment. Not only does it combat wildfires and erosion and conserve pasturelands that act as carbon sinks, it also promotes biodiversity because transhumant livestock carry millions of seeds across hundred kilometer distances. Moreover, transhumance encourages the upkeep of droving routes, a network of legally protected roads that, as well as mitigating habitat fragmentation, are themselves a valuable heritage asset.

Ten thousand farming families, with over a million head of livestock, currently move their animals between summer and winter pastures. Most use trucks, but around 3,000 still walk the old drovers’ roads. And thanks to Asociación Trashumancia y Naturaleza, their numbers are growing steadily. By lending support to livestock-raising families– in the form of equipment, logistical assistance and help with red tape and hirings –it has overseen the return to transhumance of around 200,000 sheep, goats, cows and horses.

A “Noah’s Ark” for the amphibians

Roberto Ibáñez, Director of the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institutestressedthe importance of what he described as “one of the most important awards for biodiversity conservation in Latin America and the world.”

Ibáñez explained that, thanks to the award, “we can not only pursue but enlarge our plans to inform and educate the general public about the problems facing the amphibians, as well as pressing ahead with the conservation program at our Panamanian facilities in El Valle and Gamboa.”

PARC’s goal is to halt the extinction of no less than an entire ecological class: the amphibians, the most endangered of all the world’s terrestrial vertebrates. In the last few decades alone, at least two hundred of the nearly 7,000 species of known amphibians have been driven to extinction, and a third of the remainder are under threat.After years of searching, it has now been shown that one of the animals’ main enemies is infection by the fungusBatrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd),which causes a disease called chytridiomycosis.

PARC was founded in Panama in2009 by eight organizations– zoos and conservation and research centers – under the institutional auspices of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.Its strategy is to establish fungus-free assurance colonies, whose inmates may eventually be reintroduced into the wild. A kind of Noah’s Ark.So far, twelve species have been raised in captivity, including the Panamanian golden frog, at its two conservation centers in El Valle and Gamboa.

Radio man

“Science is environment and environment is science, and both contents are vital to any understanding of reality. In the 21st century, science and the environment are specialized news areas like any other, and should be treated as such,”insists journalist Javier Gregori.

Javier Gregori (La Vall d'Uixó, Castellón, 1967) graduated from the School of Information Sciences at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) in 1991. Throughout his professional career, and especially in his 22 years in charge of environment and science reporting with radio broadcaster Cadena SER,his message has been, as he explains it, to convey “the power and majesty of nature.”

Gregori covered the famous Rio Summit of 1992, the international conference that alerted the world to the risks of untrammeled development, interviewing figures like the then senator Al Gore and the naturalist and interpreter of marine life Jacques Cousteau. He has spoken from Doñana on the importance of wetlands, from Greenland on climate change, from the Amazon on the destruction of indigenous peoples’ habitat, from Sumatra on the campaign to conserve the orangutan, from the Costa da Morte on the Prestige oil spill.

His curriculum features interviews with world figures such as primatologist Jane Goodall and IT magnate Bill Gates, and articles on ecology in newspapers like El País and El Mundo.Between 1996 and 1999, he was in charge of the environmental pages of weekly magazine Cambio 16, and heis author of the outreach publication Astronautas. Exploradores del Espacio as well as various fictional works. He has also served as a scientific advisor to the publishing house El País-Aguilar.

For more information, contact the BBVA Foundation Department of Communication and Institutional Relations (+34 91 374 5210, 91 374 8173, 91 537 3769 /) or visit