What we do

+1.400

Registered turtles

+1552

Hectares in custody

+45

Projects executed in 2021

+6.500

Awareness-raising people in 2020

7

Town councils with 0.5% of the municipal IBI allocated to the natural environment

42

Custody agreements

16

Press appearances in 2021

30%

Of custody products in El Rebost de Can Moragues

.

The Emys Foundation project was born in 1987. A group of young people attended a talk where they discovered that the pond turtle (Emys orbicularis) was threatened. These young people, motivated by the urgency of protecting this species, came together under the name of the Association for the Defense of the Natural Heritage of Riudarenes (ADEPAR) to conserve different water points with the presence of pond turtles.

In 2003, with the support of the City Council of Riudarenes and some patrons, the project took a definite boost and created what is now the Emys Foundation, an environmental entity for the conservation of the natural heritage of Catalonia. Since then, the Foundation has been adding projects that today may seem very diverse but that, in essence, continue to converge in its goal: the conservation of nature and, especially, of the wetlands and the Emys orbicularis.

Nature conservation can be done in many ways and from many perspectives. From Emys Foundation we use one of them transversely: land stewardship. Land stewardship is a tool used by environmental organizations to preserve nature in private estates, reaching agreements with owners and/or managers to perform actions that will help conservation while improving their quality.

From Emys Foundation we signed the first land stewardship agreement of the territory of Catalonia in 1989. Since then we have signed 35 forest and agricultural stewarship agreements. These agreements are the tool for involving all actors, in a coordinated way, in active and sustainable management in favour of the conservation of natural heritage. Land stewardship is different with each owner and/or manager but has common denominators in all cases; communication, trust and collaboration. We work with these aspects so that uses and activities can be made compatible in protected spaces with the conservation of natural values of the territory in the long term.