Climbing and respect for the environment go hand in hand in Gredos.
Climbing and respect for the environment go hand in hand in Gredos.
El pasado día 28 de mayo se dieron cita en la La casa del Parque de Hoyos del Espino (Parque Regional de la Sierra Gredos), un variado grupo de colectivos vinculados a la escalada. The objective was to assess the relationship between climbing and rock raptors.
The conference, organized by the FCQ with the FEDME (Federation of Mountain Sports and Climbing), was attended by the group of climbers and managers of protected areas of Castilla y León.
During the conference there were a wide variety of presentations, for example on the formal training of equipment technicians; control programs, monitoring and current status of endangered species; the role of climbing walls; good environmental practices; etc. Among the problems highlighted are the following:
- The problems caused by overcrowding, which is not generalized, but is present in very localized areas.
- The existence of regulations without scientific studies to back them up
- The reduced teaching load in the area of environmental training in courses for sports technicians given by the federation.
- The difficulty of the Administration and the federations to reach the climbing population with environmental awareness messages.
On the other hand, from the conservationist sector, the worrying decline of some species, as well as their sensitivity to human disturbances, infrastructures, loss of biodiversity or poisoning, among others, were exposed.
During part of the day, the possible measures to be implemented to mitigate the aforementioned problems in order to achieve sustainable sports practice were discussed. Among them, he stressed the need to seek strategic alliances between climbers, federations and environmental managers. Promote effective citizen participation processes, where one of the keys would be the implementation of dynamic and flexible regulations supported by quality bidirectional communication.
