One Earth
June 5 was World Environment Day, a day to remember and raise awareness of the importance of taking action against the environmental damage caused by human activity and our lifestyles. The UN estimates that humans use the equivalent of 1.6 Earths to meet our demands. According to these figures, we are living beyond the means of our planet. This year, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) launched the #OneEarth campaign to change policies and decisions and mobilize society around three issues: accelerating global warming, pollution and species threatened with extinction due to habitat degradation.
As part of GMV's commitment to sustainability and in line with the basic principles of our environmental policy, we seek to contribute to that change. In connection with the day, colleagues from GMV's Lisbon (Portugal) offices, together with their families, took part in an organized dune-cleaning activity on Inatel beach in São João da Caparica. Guided by a specialist in the environmental area of the Almada City Council, the volunteers spent the morning of June 4 cleaning the area of an exotic herbaceous species that endangers the dune environment, an important ecosystem for preserving sustainability of the fauna and flora of the area.
These initiatives are not limited to a specific date on the calendar: our commitment keeps us active all year round. It should be noted that other initiatives have been carried out in 2022 in different offices. In April, GMV's US colleagues joined local initiatives. In particular, the Los Angeles colleagues joined the work of the FOLAR (Friends of the LA River) association whose mission is to preserve the environment of the Los Angeles River, the main local urban waterway in this region. Under this association's "Earth Week CleanUps 2022" initiative, GMV colleagues removed over 45 kilograms of garbage from the river. In addition, funds were earmarked to support the association's goals of maintaining healthy conditions in the area and enhancing its climate resilience.
In Houston, Texas our GMV colleagues also joined in an environmental conservation initiative in the Spring Creek Nature Reserve. They joined forces to remove invasive plant species from this natural park, which serves as a habitat for a wide variety of fauna and flora and is a center of environmental education for the local community.
In Madrid, colleagues from the Tres Cantos office have collaborated with the Reforesta association in forest preservation work. Our colleagues went to La Barranca Valley in the Sierra de Guadarrama (Madrid) to help in the installation of individual protections and the planting of native species to preserve this ecosystem, which has been damaged by centuries of grazing, logging and charcoal extraction.
Day by day we at GMV promote healthy and sustainable habits based on the responsible consumption of resources; to this end, we implement measures in line with the 3Rs: reduce, reuse and recycle. GMV has recently carried out a campaign with all the company's employees, providing nearly 3,000 reusable stainless steel bottles with the aim of reducing the consumption of water bottled in plastic containers. In this initiative, GMV has collaborated with the Prodis Special Employment Center (Centro Especial de Empleo Prodis), which works to assist people with intellectual disabilities to enter the labor market. GMV also offered an in-house online session on health and sustainability, in which an expert on the subject presented effective alternatives to be applied at home that contribute not only to our own health but also to the sustainability of the planet.
In addition, all our facilities have recycling points for the sorting and disposal of organic waste, plastics, paper and cardboard. In our drive to continue improving, we have just installed a total of 110 additional recycling points throughout our Spanish headquarters to replace individual wastepaper baskets, with the aim of encouraging the habit of recycling.
We also carry out other actions such as the generation of clean energy by means of the solar panels installed in GMV's Madrid headquarters. And we have charging stations for electric vehicles available for employees in the Madrid Technology Park and the Boecillo Technology Park in Valladolid as a step to foment and facilitate the use of less polluting forms of transportation.
GMV's environmental policy is based on the protection and conservation of the environment, cooperation with organizations in the taking of actions that contribute to this protection and the promotion of a sense of responsibility at all levels, and our own activity is a prime example of this. At GMV, we use state-of-the-art technologies for environmental monitoring in collaboration with space institutions such as the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). From our origins, we have worked on geospace applications and services related to the environment, the management of natural resources and sustainable agriculture, in a way that safeguards social wellbeing, economic development and conservation of biodiversity.