The 20th Biodiversity Conservation Awards distinguish projects to preserve the northern bald ibis in Spain, migratory shorebirds in Latin America and elephants in Africa

The award in the Biodiversity Conservation in Spain category goes to the project for the reintroduction of the northern bald ibis in the province of Cadiz, led by the Centro de Conservación de la Biodiversidad Zoobotánico de Jerez Alberto Durán, “for representing a successful case of reintroduction of a locally extinct species of one of the world’s most endangered birds,” in the words of the jury. This initiative has not only “created a breeding colony,” it has also achieved the considerable feat of “connecting this new population via migratory routes with a pre-existing population in Austria.”

A project to conserve the migratory shorebirds of the American Pacific, coordinated from Colombia, takes the award in the Biodiversity Conservation in Latin America category for its campaigning work, which has “aligned sound scientific groundwork with societal participation in an area stretching from Mexico to Chile, encompassing 148 coastal wetlands in 11 countries,” said the jury in its citation. “Its work centers on scientifically informed and evaluated conservation actions and the creation of databases available to the scientific community, and stands out for its success in mitigating human disturbance of shorebird populations.”

The BBVA Foundation Worldwide Award for Biodiversity Conservation has been granted to the Elephant Crisis Fund in Kenya for its pioneering and ongoing contribution to the conservation of two African elephant species at risk of extinction. Its actions, said the jury, have achieved “outstanding results” in countering three of the main threats facing savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) and forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis): the illegal ivory trade, habitat destruction and conflicts with local communities.

The award for Knowledge Dissemination and Communication in audiovisual formats is shared, ex aequo, by Josefina Maestre, Director of the Reserva natural program on Radio 5 (Radio Nacional de España), and José Ramón González Pan, Head of Publications of the Autonomous National Parks Agency (Organismo Autónomo de Parques Nacionales). With “over three decades’ experience,” Maestre, says the jury, helms one of Spanish radio’s veteran environmental programs “invariably reporting with scientific rigor and an accent on environmental awareness and citizen participation.” González Pan, meantime, “stands out for his extensive professional career in which he has combined the promotion of formal environmental education in Spain with numerous audiovisual productions”; among them De parque en parque (RTVE), a 16-part documentary series on the country’s national parks.

Finally, environmental communicator Mónica Fernández-Aceytuno and Carlos Fresneda Puerto, a correspondent for newspaper El Mundo, are joint winners of the award for Knowledge Dissemination and Communication in other formats. Through her “long and tireless efforts relaying environmental concerns and knowledge to society through the world of letters and the radio,” Fernández-Aceytuno has created what the jury describes as “a personal universe of words that bring the reader into direct contact with the most varied phenomena and processes of nature, constructing a human ecosystem that is responsive to the conservation of the environment.” Her co-winner Fresneda is hailed as “a pioneer of environmental reporting” whose work in the written press “has given voice to both prominent scientists and a wide range of figures from the world of environmental conservation, disseminating novel, cutting-edge initiatives that contribute to the improvement of our planet.”

Biodiversity Conservation in Spain: Centro de Conservación de la Biodiversidad Zoobotánico Jerez

The reintroduction to the Iberian Peninsula of one of the world’s most endangered birds

The northern bald or hermit ibis, a black-plumed bird with a long curved beak and the characteristic head that gives it its name, went from being present in North Africa, the Middle East, Southern Europe – including Spain – and Central Europe to being extinct in every single territory with the exception of Morocco, where some 700 sedentary individuals remain in the wild. The alarm was raised internationally back in the 1990s, leading the Centro de Conservación de la Biodiversidad Zoobotánico Jerez (ZBJ) Alberto Durán, a public agency under Jerez City Council, to launch the Eremita Project, aimed at creating a breeding colony that could be a springboard for the species’ reintroduction in Spain.

“The hermit ibis is a bird that lives in groups, spends a lot of time on the ground and feeds mainly on insects that it extracts with its long beak. For this reason, its ideal habitat is grasslands,” explains Miguel Ángel Quevedo, the project’s coordinator. “In the past 50 years, its world population has slumped by 90% as a consequence of persecution, pesticides and land-use changes, which have gradually turned pastures into crop fields.”

As the species nests in coastal and inland cliff sites, the International Advisory Group for the Northern Bald Ibis – a team of experts set up by the United Nations Environment Programme – proposed the south of Spain as a suitable test ground. The ZBJ’s Eremita Project had its official launch in 2003, focused on reintroducing the species in the Jandas area of Cadiz province. Under a partnership agreement with the Spanish Ministry of Defence, an aviary was installed at one end of the Retín military zone, near Zahara de los Atunes, and the Junta de Andalucía co-financed the study of release methods, with scientific input from the Estación Biológica de Doñana (CSIC).

“The individuals involved with the captive breeding wore black t-shirts and helmets in the form of the northern bald ibis. This meant the chicks would imprint on them when dressed this way but would not recognize them in other clothes,” Quevedo explains. “That was important because, once in the wild, we didn’t want the birds approaching any humans they came across, but we did want them to follow their disguised carers and expand through the area once the cage was opened.” Starting in 2004, the ZBJ raised, released and monitored around 30 chicks a year, an effort that four years later would produce a major and consequential milestone: the first reintroduction in the wild of birds born in captivity.

This marked the start of the project’s next phase with the aid of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA), which had set up its own captive breeding program in the 1990s. The result was what Quevedo refers to as “the paradox of having between 1,000 and 1,500 northern bald ibises in zoos across the continent, while the bird was going extinct in the wild.” A request went out and over 30 zoos in Germany, Austria, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic and Switzerland began sending juveniles to the Eremita Project. “This allowed us to introduce 60 chicks each year, after successfully integrating ZBJ and European specimens,” says Mariano Cuadrado, a conservation biologist and another of the project’s leaders. “Since 2014 we have seen between 35 and 55 chicks annually born in the wild, so we already have a population that is stable, and possibly – we are evaluating it – self-sustaining, with more individuals born than dying. We have stopped introducing captive-bred chicks in order to confirm this,” he explains. The number of breeding pairs and chicks born in the wild is growing every year, with 32 nests spread over 3 colonies recorded in 2024, resulting in 64 hatchings.

“We’re not interested in exhibiting animals, our aim is to conserve them,” says Quevedo, to which Mariano Cuadrado adds: “The reintroduction of the ibis is the culmination of years of work with endangered Iberian species: the Iberian lynx, spoonbill, Egyptian vulture, bearded vulture, marbled duck and lesser kestrel, among others.” As Maher Mahjoub, head of the Center for Mediterranean Cooperation of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, states in his nomination letter, all these successes have made the ZBJ “an international reference in breeding projects for endangered species.”

Biodiversity Conservation in Latin America: Migratory Shorebirds Project

An international network of 11 countries to protect the migratory birds of the Pacific coastline

The Migratory Shorebird Project began in 2011 as a network of organizations devoted to making scientific counts of shorebirds along their flyways. Fourteen years later, it brings together organizations from the 11 Latin American countries with Pacific coastlines, from Mexico to Chile, and serves as a key support for the birds’ conservation and for the communities living around the ecosystems that sustain them.

When Luis Fernando Castillo was studying Seabird and Shorebird Ecology at the Universidad del Valle (Colombia), he and other students formed a group to band and release the migratory birds stopping over on Colombian beaches, in the hope that their efforts would help towards a better knowledge of the animals’ behavior. “Back then,” he recalls, “the study of shorebirds was a new thing. But we were excited to think that what we were doing was part of a far bigger exercise, and that our beach was part of a chain linking Alaska to Patagonia.”

The group would shortly form itself into the Asociación Calidris, which Castillo now heads. And given the migratory nature of the birds, it quickly joined forces with similar initiatives in other countries. With the support of the U.S. Forest Service, they came up with a monitoring project that would take in the whole region the birds traveled. Little by little, more countries came on board and, as of 2019, the project encompasses Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, along with organizations in the two North American Pacific countries, the United States and Canada.

Bird counts identified human activities that might threaten their survival, so the network started to engage directly in conservation activities. “People who are enjoying themselves on the beach sometimes think their behavior is harmless,” explains Diana Lucía Eusse, a Calidris researcher and the project’s coordinator. “A key resource to mitigate this impact has been bird festivals, which have been hugely effective in teaching people in a fun way about the importance of birds,” she continues. “And we have also worked with real estate developers to create exclusion zones at certain times of the year so the beach space is shared between birds and humans.”

In this and many other cases, the network has found that conserving birds means involving people: “That’s very much the story of Calidris,” Castillo relates; “the progression from counting birds to thinking about how you can work with people and address their needs.” Eusse expands on this point: “In Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, biodiverse sites are shared by people who may be facing complex situations in terms of physical, educational and health capital. And sometimes, as working biologists, we can reach places no one else can get to. Bird conservation is also about strengthening the agency of local communities, because when you work with communities, nature feels the benefit.”

The network has also forged links with salt and shrimp producers in a number of countries, resulting in recommendations to establish water levels in salt and shrimp ponds that allow passing birds to rest and feed there. But the real key to getting these recommendations put into practice has been to stress the economic benefits they bring to producers; in terms of corporate image but also through the birds’ usefulness as quality indicators – their presence or rather absence may indicate that ponds are in poor condition and need intervention. “This has been one of our great lessons as conservationists,” Eusse reflects. “The goal is not to make money out of everything. Rather to be truly successful you need to talk in terms of sustainable production.”

One of the day-to-day challenges the network faces is the huge diversity of its member organizations: “Each country’s reality is different, the political and economic situation, the inhabitants…. So it’s vital that we address the needs and particularities of each place,” Castillo observes. For him, frequent meetings and the ability to listen are vital in this regard. As is the network’s insistence that the work is done locally. In this respect, “the project has been a way of positioning Latin America and advertising the fact that we have people here who are highly qualified.”

Worldwide Award: Elephant Crisis Fund

The goal: to save endangered elephants throughout Africa

The organization Save the Elephants was founded in 1993, with science and partnership as its main pillars, to research into the animals’ ecology and behavior and develop pan-African strategies for their conservation. Two decades later, the organization set up a dedicated fund, the Elephant Crisis Fund, to finance small, community-led conservation projects in 34 African countries, at times using them as a testing ground to attract much larger funding. “Big investors are often keen to donate millions of dollars for a given strategy, but they don’t know if it works yet,” explains Frank Pope, the CEO of Save the Elephants, “So we fund a project of, say, 50,000 dollars on a trial basis, knowing it can catalyze a much bigger investment if we can make it work.”

The Fund was initially set up to tackle the crisis of the ivory trade, which for centuries had posed the greatest threat to the elephants’ existence. Despite being banned internationally in 1989, an illegal ivory trade network continued to exist, which the organization estimates killed some 100,000 elephants between 2010 and 2012 alone, a quarter of the African population at the time.

Its remit then was to support local organizations that Save the Elephants had identified as being most effective at protecting the animals, providing them not just with cash but also advanced knowledge on technologies and other techniques to put a stop to poaching, trafficking and the demand for ivory. It was also the first organization to bring traffickers to trial in the United States, ending the legal impunity they had enjoyed by exploiting international loopholes and, within Africa, the corruption of local judicial systems.

“We are constantly traveling to the countries we work with, listening to communities about which ideas work, so we can suggest them to others and ensure the knowledge gets shared, ” says Pope. Another key to their success is speed: they encourage applicants to submit short proposals, which are decided on at monthly meetings, and once funding has been approved it reaches the chosen project in a couple of weeks.

These efforts came to fruition in 2018, when China, the world’s biggest market, announced that they were closing down their domestic trade in ivory. Save the Elephants thought about closing the Elephant Crisis Fund, but decided that the vast network of contacts it had built up over the years could be used to go on monitoring elephant trafficking and address what had become the main challenge for the animals: coexistence with humans.

Elephants may at times break water storage tanks in lower rainfall areas, prompting the communities living there to seek revenge. But the greatest conflict affects wetter areas, where people live on subsistence farming. “Elephants don’t know what a crop field is, so they come into a cornfield and in one evening they can demolish a whole family’s food,” Pope explains. “Even if that family used to feel positive towards elephants, they will quickly turn against them in self-protection.”

But elephants are also, as Pope points out, a keystone species in the ecosystem, who distribute seeds, find water and open paths through the bush that other species can follow. To dial down conflict with humans, the awardee organization has come up with a “toolbox” that pulls together the accumulated knowledge of decades on what strategies work to prevent or mitigate elephant-human clashes. “One solution, for instance, is to plan building works and crop fields so they don’t stand within the corridors the elephants use. Leaving some areas of land free for the elephants can avoid a lot of conflicts.”

“We subscribe to the ideas of One Health,” the CEO continues. “If people are malnourished and children aren’t able to go to school, they’re not going to care about what’s happening with elephants. So part of our work is to empower communities.” Among the ways to do so, and at the same time aid the cause of elephant conservation, are growing crops that are not edible by elephants, promoting craft work and sales as an alternative livelihood, and strengthening judicial protection. “Africa has the world’s fastest growing population. As the continent develops, the landscape changes, and elephants are stuck in the middle of it all. We have a window of opportunity to ensure that elephants’ needs are also taken into account in ways that will help them thrive long into the future while reducing conflict between them and humans.”

José Ramón González Pan (supplied), Josefina Maestre (supplied), Mónica Fernández-Aceytuno (© Roberto Seoane) and Carlos Fresneda (© Miguel Fresneda)

Knowledge Dissemination and Communication (audiovisual formats)

Josefina Maestre: A sustained commitment to radio reporting on the environment

For 16 years, Josefina Maestre Zango (Madrid, 1963) has directed Reserva natural on Radio 5, the longest-standing national radio program dedicated to the environment, on air now for over two decades. “It is to be welcomed that public radio has made a sustained commitment to environmental reporting in the charge of specialist professionals,” says Maestre, the more so when its content “directs listeners towards citizens’ action. We are public servants fulfilling a social function.”

In her Sunday appointment with Reserva natural listeners, Maestre invites them to reflect on the relationship between human beings and their environment, biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, the ecological transition, responsible consumption and social participation, without forgetting the economic, cultural and historical aspects of nature. Asked about the show’s longevity, she says “it’s the range of topics to do with having a healthy life and a healthy environment that gets people hooked on this type of content.”

The award citation refers to her over 30-year trajectory “reporting with scientific rigor and an accent on environmental awareness and citizen participation”; a professional commitment that dates back to 1991, just a year before the now mythical Río de Janeiro Earth Summit, when she took on the editorship of the pioneering magazine Ecología y sociedad.

“I was in touch with a group of journalists and we felt there was a need for a general-interest publication that would put out this type of information, bringing issues like the deterioration of nature or water and air pollution to the public. It was a project that marked me and encouraged me to venture further into this branch of specialized journalism.”

Following this experience, she wrote regularly for publications like the Biosfera supplement of Diario 16 or the weekly supplement of El País, until 1996 when she joined Radio 5 and began her 16 years stint at the helm of Naturaleza y medio ambiente, as well as contributing on an occasional basis to general public radio programs with environmental sections.

Maestre declares herself fascinated with radio, her favorite medium, since it offers “the chance not just to give the news headlines, but to tell a longer story, because we have language in our favor. We transmit images to the listener through voice and a good narrative.”

She has combined her work as a journalist with that of environmental educator via Reserva natural extra, a radio project taking her to secondary schools where she has interacted live with more than 3,000 students from what she describes as “the generation that holds the key to turning around the ecological emergency and biodiversity crisis we are now living through.” The program also featured interviews with renowned naturalists, researchers, writers, musicians and athletes.

In addition, Maestre has extensive experience in publishing projects on biodiversity and the environment, as a member of the founding group of two specialized publishers, Calenda and Viento Norte.

An ornithology enthusiast, she coordinated the SEO/Birdlife documentary film series Pajareros, with eleven editions to date.

Conscious of the emerging threat of disinformation, she stresses the importance of environmental reporters as “a vehicle for the voice of scientists and legislators to reach the public, which is of vital importance if science and politics are to advance.” More than ever, she believes, “we have to defend a journalism based on credible sources that presents the news with scientific rigor.”

José Ramón González Pan: A multimedia exploration of Spain’s national parks

The environmental vocation of José Ramón González Pan (Madrid, 1958) traces to his childhood days in his grandmother’s home in rural Galicia, an experience that steered him towards forestry engineering. Since 2015, he has been Head of the Publications Service of the Autonomous National Parks Agency of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, where he is in charge of the coordination and edition of more than 200 physical and digital books and more than 2 million informative materials on nature conservation and natural parks in Spain, “one of the best scenarios for researching on climate change.”

After starting out in 1981 as an environmental educator and monitor, in 1987 he became the first director of the National Center for Environmental Education (CENEAM), where he was among the pioneers in incorporating environmental education into the Spanish school system, designing and producing the first training programs with a cross-cutting approach. “Educating for the environment is all-important,” he insists, “because it involves a refashioning of traditional models to factor the global perspective.”

A scriptwriter and director on multiple audiovisual productions in the realms of environmental education, training and wildfire prevention, one of González Pan’s career highlights was his documentary series for Spanish national television: De parque en parque, a journey through the country’s most emblematic natural spaces. “Creating a series covering the entire network of Spain’s 16 national parks and having the chance to interview over 300 researchers, scientists, educators, managers, technicians and local people on their relationship towards them is a luxury available to very few,” he recalls today.

The naturalist declares himself firmly opposed to the staging of nature by artificial means, even if it means “waiting patiently for two weeks at 50 meters’ distance for the image of a bearded vulture in its nest, spending hours in the cold with the camera running. A 20-second shot may not be very profitable, but it is the truth and the truth is irrefutable.”

It is precisely this commitment to the truth of the image that has led him to explore novel audiovisual techniques: “In the national park covering part of Cantabria, I got some stunning 4K shots of bears with special photo-trapping cameras. You realize that when the animal is not aware that there are people around, it behaves in a totally different way.”

González Pan has also contributed to multiple media outlets as an expert on fire prevention and firefighting, a task whose importance is thrown into sharp relief by the fires that recently devastated much of Spain. “Fire may be an element of nature,” he remarks, “but in our hands it can become a major risk to biodiversity. And it is vital to get across that we should be far more concerned than we currently are.”

He has worked as an environmental columnist for Cambio 16 and as a contributor to El País, where he has published more than a hundred articles on biodiversity. In the course of his career, he has witnessed a sea change in the media’s receptiveness to biodiversity issues. “Before, awareness campaigns on forest fires, for example, were paid for out of public funds, but now it’s the media who have taken on this role. We no longer wait for a media plan to finance a campaign, it is the journalists themselves who are helping raise awareness.”

González Pan’s interest in biodiversity conservation, closely linked to geography and landscape study, has led him to author and/or coordinate publications on the Picos de Europa, Doñana, Las Tablas de Daimiel, Sierra de Las Nieves and other national parks.

Despite having carved out a path stretching over more than three decades, he has lost none of his desire to learn: “What drives me is having to force myself to go on learning and studying so I can answer complicated questions in a simple way.”

Knowledge Dissemination and Communication (other formats)

Mónica Fernández-Aceytuno: Reconnecting with nature through the power of words

Mónica Fernández-Aceytuno (Villa Cisneros, Western Sahara, 1961) is an environmental communicator and nature writer. A columnist with ABC for almost two decades, she currently contributes to the Cadena SER radio program Hoy por Hoy Madrid, which features her Diccionario Aceytuno, a collection of words naming elements of nature that she has been compiling and defining throughout her career.

A biologist by training, it was after a stay in Alaska that Fernández-Aceytuno, who was then working for a Catalan pharmaceutical firm, decided to change her professional direction: “I came out of that trip transformed and determined, after contemplating the sublime landscapes of Alaska, to leave my job, which was a good job, and devote myself to proclaiming abroad the beauty of nature.” Her first port of call, in 1991, was the Cadena SER radio program Hoy por hoy, then presented by Iñaki Gabilondo. Every day, after the 10:00 news, she produced a section known as Parte Natural in the style of a weather report. In it, she explains, she would speak about plants in bloom, the arrival of orcas or swallows, give the ozone layer index and fire risk data and broadcast sounds of nature: “Even then I argued that nature should be like culture, that it didn’t need a disaster to be valid news. We don’t just talk about a museum because it has burned down, but when an exhibition opens. Nature is a permanent art exhibition, and it has to be advertised so we can enjoy this natural heritage any day.”

The success of Parte Natural led to many invitations from newspapers and magazines to write on the environment. She began at the magazine Cambio 16, where she had a full-page article, and moved from there to Diario 16. She then took her byline to newspaper ABC, where she remained for 19 years. Her first appearance was in the News section, with a piece titled “Arrival of the Birds that Sleep in the Air,” but the paper soon launched a dedicated Ecology section. “It was a nice experience to bring the swifts to the print press,” she recalls.

The writer talks about the power of words to make us aware of the environment around us in all its beauty. “We are losing sight of the wonders of nature here in Spain, the most biodiverse country in Europe, because we don’t know how to name them. There are very few people capable of naming the tree growing below their house, the bird that flies overhead every day, the insects they encounter, or what they feel on contemplating a particular landscape. Human language has distanced us from nature and I want to use it now to reconnect us,” she says. This was the thinking behind the Diccionario Aceytuno which she began in 2012, and which now has thousands of terms hosted on its website. Not only that, the glossary has its own “academy”, with members specializing in different species (for example, the brown bear, cork oak or holm oak) who are in charge of compiling the words for that particular entry.

In parallel, Aceytuno has written for specialist magazines like Salvaje, directed the Clips Natura mini documentaries on Spanish wildlife, and published outreach books such as El país de los pájaros que duermen en el aire, La tercera rama or, more recently, Mañana es tarde, where she advocates a model of sustainable development that preserves biodiversity.

The award-winning writer has called for a “third branch” between science and literature which draws knowledge from them both: “I think that all the arts and sciences help to understand the environment. Knowledge can also come from poetry and literature. I have transited this third branch, using words, poetry and writing to talk about science and spread knowledge. If we want people to know and defend nature, it has to move them. Poetry and art are what convey the emotion of nature’s beauty, which is what truly touches us.”

Carlos Fresneda: The voice of the ‘ecoheroes’ proposing solutions to the climate crisis

Carlos Fresneda (Madrid, 1963) is currently the Paris correspondent for newspaper El Mundo. Having arrived in the French capital six months ago, he speaks admiringly of the city’s green transformation, describing it as like living in his own “little paradise.” He previously worked for the same newspaper in London, New York and Milan.

The journalist spent his childhood in Carabanchel – “in the Calle del Campo, because back then that was where the city really ended.” Despite being surrounded by a mostly urban landscape, he always felt the pull of nature. “That love of nature, reinforced by the contact I had with Adena (now WWF/Adena) and CODA (now Ecologistas en Acción) led me to write on the creation of the Manzanares Regional Park or the problem of radioactive radon gas in the Madrid sierra. And the experience taught me that this was a whole field of journalism still to be explored, while I continued to keep a close eye on day-to-day local news.”

After starting his career at El País, Fresneda joined the founding team of El Mundo in 1987, where he combined the busy role of correspondent with writing about environmental issues. “I have had the bad luck that, wherever I went, the situation ended up getting complicated. In Italy, for example, I lived through a harrowing period with the mafia killings of Borsellino and Falcone, but I also witnessed the birth of the Slow Food movement with Carlo Petrini. Environmental news has served me as an antidote, one that stopped me becoming the sad chronicler of daily life. Now I try to focus on the solutions side and tell personal stories,” he relates.

Some of these reports on the protagonists of the environmental news were written for El Mundo’s environmental supplement Natura; others were published in his blog Ecohéroes, a section on the newspaper’s website. He interviewed scientists like atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, marine biologist Sylvia Earle, the climatologist James Hansen, a pioneer in alerting to climate change, and activists such as Jane Goodall, Paul Hawken and George Monbiot. In addition to his press work, he is the author of a literary environmental trilogy consisting of La vida simple (1997), Ecohéroes: 100 voces por la salud del planeta (2020), and Un siglo verde (2023). He is now contemplating a new project: a book to be titled La ciudad posible, for which he plans to visit cities that are prefiguring the future, not only in the global North, but also in Latin America (Medellin, Curitiba), Africa (Freetown) and Asia (Singapore, Chengdu).

Asked about his models in environmental reporting, he mentions two previous winners in the same award category: the writer Joaquín Araújo and El Mundo’s first ever environmental correspondent, Gustavo Catalán Deus, who sadly died this year. He also talks about Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente’s influence on a whole generation in thrall to his nature program El hombre y la Tierra, while highlighting three books that directly shaped his vocation as an environmental journalist: Biophilia, by Edward O. Wilson, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman and Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake.

For the awardee, the biggest challenge in environmental reporting is the lack of space press being given to these issues: “It seems the climate world is only of interest when a disaster happens, then it drops off the pages. It is particularly difficult to find space to report on possible solutions, because the thinking is still that if it’s not bad news, it isn’t news at all.” For this reason, the correspondent calls for the return of environmental supplements like those which newspapers ran before the 2008 crisis.

Fresneda admits that we are going through a period of global gloom, as the United States turns its back on major climate agreements and treaties. He believes nonetheless that there is still “light at the end of the tunnel and, above all, people doing work that, sooner or later, will end up bearing fruit.”

About the BBVA Foundation Awards for Biodiversity Conservation

Biodiversity stands alongside climate change as the core environmental issue of our time. For more than twenty years now, the BBVA Foundation Awards for Biodiversity Conservation have recognized the work of people and organizations that have achieved relevant and lasting results in the protection of biodiversity, and professionals from the world of communication who disseminate the best scientific knowledge and report on the environmental crisis to raise awareness and alert society to the challenges ahead.

Each of the three project categories, in Spain, Latin America and the World, come with a cash prize of 250,000 euros, while the two knowledge dissemination and communication categories are funded with 80,000 euros each, giving a combined monetary amount that is among the largest of any international award scheme in the environmental arena.

The jury deciding the awards (see list below) is made up of scientists working in the environment field and environmental communicators, who bring to the table complementary viewpoints on nature conservation.

Jury members

The jury in this edition was chaired by Rafael Pardo, Director of the BBVA Foundation. Remaining members were Marta Coll, Research Professor at the Institut de Ciències del Mar, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC); José Luis Gallego, Head of the Environment section of newspaper El Confidencial and director of Ecogallego; Silvia García, Environment specialist on news program Antena 3 Noticias; Teresa Guerrero, Head of the Science and Environment section of newspaper El Mundo; Ainhoa Magrach, Ikerbasque Research Professor at the Basque Centre for Climate Change and President of the Ecological Association of Terrestrial Ecology (AEET); Eva Rodríguez, Head of Environment and Society section of the Agencia SINC scientific news service; and Anna Traveset, Research Professor at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies, CSIC-Universitat de les Iles Balears.