The 1st International Congress on Biodiversity and Agriculture will bring together experts from around the world in Jaén to demonstrate how nature conservation can enhance agricultural profitability.
The 1st International Congress on Biodiversity and Agriculture (ICBA) is a scientific meeting promoted by the conservation group SEO/BirdLife, to be held from April 14 to 17 in Jaén, within the framework of the LIFE Olivares Vivos+ project. This forum aims to gather experts from different countries to help implement a sustainable, conservation-oriented, and nature-friendly agricultural model.
This goal is one of the fundamental pillars of SEO/BirdLife’s work, which for the past quarter-century has been promoting an agrarian model of “Living Countryside”—a new way of seeing, inhabiting, cultivating, and protecting rural areas that returns to its origins without renouncing progress. In essence, it is an alliance between biodiversity, agriculture, and people—a strategic approach that enhances profitability, strengthens biodiversity, boosts climate resilience, and generates new economic opportunities linked to the land.
In this spirit, the ICBA is born with the ambition of becoming an international benchmark forum for analyzing how to integrate biodiversity as a structural component of agricultural systems. To that end, it will bring together members of the scientific and agricultural sectors, public authorities, entrepreneurs, and market actors to debate the future of agriculture.
José Eugenio Gutiérrez, head of Agri-food Systems and Rural Environment at SEO/BirdLife, emphasizes that this congress is not just an academic forum but also a platform to connect science, the countryside, the market, and society. “Biodiversity is not an ornament for agriculture but an intrinsic part of its production process. One can farm either turning their back on nature or by incorporating it into the agricultural model and benefiting from its services—but one fact is undeniable: without biodiversity, there can be no sustainability.”
The choice of Jaén as the host city reflects its status as the world’s leading olive-growing region and its role as a living and demonstrative laboratory of how biodiversity can be integrated into agricultural systems.
