LiverdPress Award 2014

Fundació Mar was created in 2004 with the aim of working actively to improve and conserve the coastal and marine environment as a fundamental way to guarantee our quality of life and that of future generations in a healthy and ecologically functional environment. Fundació Mar designs intelligent innovative projects to obtain information about the state of the marine environment and to act effectively to improve and conserve it. Key projects of Fundació Mar include MARIAGE (Sea and Agents), which studies interactions between man and the coast, and the SILMAR project on the Catalan and Balearic coast, a network that diagnoses the marine environment with the support of volunteers, companies and local institutions, with a view to establishing corrective and conservation measures based on the concept of marine custody.

Another noteworthy project is Mar d’Esperança, with which the Foundation brings the sea closer to children through the use of new underwater technologies. Other activities include the innovative AQVAM project, in Pals, which will develop an international centre for the biosphere, in which bio-knowledge and the active conservation of nature and the sea will be the basis for work to assess the natural heritage of L’Empordà and the Mediterranean. The AQVAM project will be implemented soon and it is hoped that it will position itself as a benchmark in Europe in terms of education, applied sustainability, scientific tourism and the conservation of marine and coastal biodiversity.

In 2013, Fundació Mar won the BBVA Foundation’s Espais Solidaris Prize and it has been selected with two of its projects by the CosmoCaixa Ecotendencias programme.