Quantification and cartography of ecosystem services in the Regional Territorial Managenmet Plan of Cantabria.

Sensitive and aware, since the beginning of our journey as abtemas, we have been working on all our interventions, as direction, coordination or drafting, for the development of plans and projects, from the perspective of social cohesion and the necessary integration and environmental efficiency.

Reviewing some proposals in which we have collaborated, we found this text sent to the National Congress of Environment CONAMA 2018. Heading 20.30. We have thought it was appropriate to rescue a proposal that, for more than a year, strange as it may seem, has been put in the freezer by the current Government of Cantabria for which it was prepared. You can download the complete text from this link that we accompany with a poster accessible in this other link, with the confidence that someday it will see the light, under another denomination, signature or address, we leave it to you for your reading and diffusion.

The Regional Territorial Management Plan of Cantabria (PROT) proposes the development of a balanced and polycentric system of settlements and cities that seeks to redefine the relationships between rural and urban areas, through equitable access to infrastructure, service networks and knowledge, without forgetting the protection of the natural environment and heritage management. The model is organized in two fundamental axes:

1. Environmental efficiency, linked to territorial resilience;
2. Social cohesion, in terms of well-being and quality of life under equal conditions.

Both issues will be the key elements in the progress towards a sustainable model capable of generating wealth and well-being for Cantabrian society in accordance with the territory’s capacities.

By this way the territorial model emerges. From the organisation and structuring of human activities on the basis of the territorial heritage that supports and hosts them. A heritage made up of the spaces that are constituted as reserves, sources or places of production for natural resources, to which an asset value is conferred and whose exploitation must be subject to principles of sustainable management, and by the areas that provide ecosystem services of territorial interest.

From the services of ecological connectivity and promotion of the diversity of species and habitats, to the services of provisioning without neglecting the ecosystem services of regulation.The PROT regulates the efficient use of land from its own vocation and identity, banishing the residual vision of rustic land or open space, to assume the need and importance of integrating it actively in the planning tools.

Within the natural heritage, Green Infrastructure emerges as a complementary but integrating concept, a measure of valorization taking into account ecosystem services on the one hand and essential services on the other, appearing in this strategic planning document as the basic territorial infrastructure for the management of adaptation to change, through the integrated reading of the processes that occur between natural and anthropogenic dynamics, offering rural or mountain municipalities a new point of view with the importance of the role they can play in the settlement system.

Municipalities that, as can be seen in these tables, provide urban areas with the ecosystem services necessary to maintain their functionality, development and potential quality of life.