Jordi Pietx i Colom

Caring for Spain’s abundant biodiversity of plants and animals has always been perceived by the public as the government’s responsibility. Jordi Pietx i Colom is changing this view by establishing the necessary structures, legal tools and networks to help civil society take a major, active role in land and biodiversity conservation.

Jordi is shifting the responsibility for land stewardship from the hands of big landowners and government to local community members by giving groups and organizations opportunities to care for and protect their land through new legal tools and networks of citizen associations, foundations dedicated to protect biodiversity, local government departments, environmental consultants, universities and other research centers, as well as other grassroots organizations. In creating a large network of stakeholders, he has mobilized a broad base of support that allows him to communicate his message quickly, and capture people’s interest.

Jordi has introduced land stewardship concepts and mechanisms that are new to Spain in order to empower local people to protect and care for their land. He has created a large organizational network that continues to grow as he creates and disseminates new and simple tools to engage civil society more widely. He is also working with the Government Administration and law-makers to promote creative interpretations of the current legal framework that allow new groups such as small scale land owners and civil society organizations to participate in land conservation. These relationships are a key long-term factor in developing new laws that protect biodiversity from environmental dangers.

With the aim of forming a strong platform that will have influence on the national level, Jordi hopes to achieve reforms that establish permanent land stewardship mechanisms. These include, among other, fiscal incentives, quality seals, tourism opportunities and other benefits. This long-term vision combines land stewardship with a new bottom-up approach of protecting more land and getting more citizens directly involved in caring for their territory in a sustainable way.

Spain is the country in the European Union with the largest biodiversity rate, but also with the highest number of species in danger of extinction. Despite the policies and initiatives put in place over past decades, biodiversity continues to suffer. According to most studies, 91 percent of Spanish citizens believe that their natural ecosystem is an area of concern, but only a portion of these people claim to be doing something about it. Although people feel that ecosystem degradation is a problem, due to the cultural and political context, the responsibility to actually solve the problem tends to be placed in the government’s hands.

Although it is true that public intervention is needed to protect the land from threats to its biodiversity, the government does not have the financial capacity nor the political will to do so, particularly when land is privately owned and divided into small properties. In the region of Catalonia, for example, 80 percent of forest lands are privately owned and highly fragmented: seventy-five percent of these lands are divided in properties less than 25 hectares. In this context, the government is limited to creating national parks or imposing legal restrictions on how land owners can use their property. Without the participation and true involvement of individual land owners and a significant portion of the population, it is impossible to effectively protect and nurture the land that holds important life-forms.

One of the main reasons the general population at large have not taken active responsibility in ecosystem conservation, is because the main mechanisms traditionally available for protecting and conserving the land have been designed for and managed exclusively by the government. Civil society has had few options to directly preserve the territory other than rallying for certain areas to be cared for or pointing out abuses by those who own the land. This has further fed the conception that citizens in general have no means with which to contribute to the actual solution of the problem and that it is only the big landowners and government created offices that are capable of protecting the land.

The mere conceptual basis of land stewardship, very common in the U.S. and U.K., is practically unknown in Spain, with only 52 recorded cases of such contracts signed before 2000. This is also the case in most of Europe, where very few initiatives are available to local citizen groups and other organizations.

Jordi is creating a land stewardship network of different citizen sector, business, and public sector organizations as a means of participating in the protection of biodiversity. Over the past four years, he has worked to attract new members and increase the membership of his network. He has already formed a regional contingency of 135 organizations, and continues to raise awareness so more people and organizations can find opportunities to engage in environmental protection. Together, his group has developed and put into practice a series of effective processes to empower citizen groups and other organizations to protect their land.

In an effort to be inclusive, Jordi engages new groups and collectives that previously have not been perceived as environmentally friendly, including large municipalities and private companies like mineral extraction corporations, creating ways for them to take part in the conservation effort. As their work to protect the environment becomes visible throughout the network, other unconsidered entities begin to seek out opportunities to be involved.

By creatively using laws already in place, Jordi has ensured the legality of the voluntary agreements that are being made amongst those involved in the processes of land stewardship. For these efforts to be perpetuated, he has engaged different levels of the government, who are now composing new laws and legislative tools that allow the participation of stakeholders like citizen groups and organizations in environmental protection. He has persuaded a series of local and regional government agencies to join the network to take part in this transformation and, with them as his partners, he is preparing new proposals for the national government in order to promote local land stewardship and make it part of their established plans for protecting the environment.

Aware that interest in land stewardship often develops from a sense of belonging to a given territory, Jordi drives his replication strategy from a very local base. His vision is a federation of regional networks that reaches across Spain and has strong links with others around the globe. To do this, he first establishes a strong base in the region of Catalonia, including key members from other regions who are learning from the experience in order to form their own regional network. As he broadens and deepens the links in one area, he helps other regions do the same, gradually driving a nation-wide impact. Jordi has fostered the launch of an informal national platform that aims to bring together the newly formed regional networks.

Parallel to this national expansion plan, Jordi’s network is already engaging with other organizations and platforms interested in land stewardship in countries such as Italy and the Czech Republic, along with other organizations in Canada and the United Stales. His vision is that through the creation of these different networks, a synergy will drive a push for deeper structural changes that will give society a permanent opportunity to actively participate in land stewardship.

Jordi developed his lifelong passion for the environment from a very young age. He grew up in a small city near the Pyrenees Mountains, where his grandparents lived and worked. Surrounded by natural beauty, he was always fascinated by nature. As he studied biology and natural landscapes, he began to worry about society’s lack of interest in caring for their land and the biodiversity it holds. With this in mind, he pursued a degree in biology, after which he earned a Masters degree in Environmental Studies.

While traveling and studying different ways of caring for nature he encountered an array of organizations and initiatives that were successful in conserving land and engaging citizens. In 1995, Jordi volunteered for six months with one of these key organizations, Quebec-Labrador Foundation/Atlantic Center for the Environment, working for their Land Trust program. Seeing first-hand the application of these new mechanisms for private land stewardship was an important moment in Jordi’s career, shaping views that would later influence his idea to re-structure much of the environmental sector in Spain.

Recognizing that the U.S. and U.K. top-down approach to land stewardship, which focused on maximizing acres protected, would not work in Spain, Jordi knew that he needed to build a movement from the bottom up by getting local people and groups involved in protecting their land. Based on community organizing techniques, he began to think about how to get started in ways that would engage groups on the local level.

In 1996, Jordi returned to Spain inspired to finally set his plans into motion, and he spent four years working as an environmental consultant while building relationships and networks with the organizations and entities whose work had relation to land stewardship. Once he managed to put an initial network together, he hammered out a plan to give civil society a new way to promote land stewardship and protect local biodiversity in 2000.