Environment Minister Carolina Schmidt and the Chief Scientist and Deputy Director General of the United Kingdom’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC), Christine Maggs, signed an inter-institutional agreement for technical cooperation on the conservation and management of protected marine and coastal areas. This agreement will promote the effective management of protected marine and coastal areas, and in particular, multiple-use protected marine and coastal areas in their respective countries, as well as other actions that contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of marine ecosystems.
After the signing, which took place at the Catholic University’s Extension Center in Santiago, joint work began with the kicking off of the seminar called «Bases for the monitoring of protected marine areas in Chile», which addressed both countries’ challenges with respect to the implementation and monitoring of marine protected areas. During the rest of the week, meetings were held in Viña del Mar and Valparaíso with the presence of marine biodiversity conservation experts and with the support, organization and representation of leading entities such as Sernapesca, in order to design a national monitoring program of protected marine areas, which will include a health assessment of the marine ecosystems and species of those places under protection.
The teams at both the Environment Ministry and Sernapesca were grateful and very satisfied with the high technical level of our team’s interpretation services, which supported them in Santiago and in regions during this week of meetings where important decisions were made.