A brand is a word that defines you, which matches you and sketches the path to ahead of you.

It is like a shadow from which you cannot detach and which follows you wherever you go.

If you are there, so it is the shadow. Each company has its own brand, that one which we have been cultivating and taking care of day by day, year after year. It is our presentation card, which places us as precise actors in a precise environment. Since some months ago, an opportunity has arisen to add up to our brand another certification and logo, another identity feature which identifies us not only as differentiated actors in an environment, but it turns out us in active members of this environment. We are proud to shine this certificate of «Minorca Biosphere Reserve».

If we heed the pre-requisites on paper, this is a brand which accredits a sustainable way of being and doing, which also puts in value those companies developing the economic activities of the island along with initiatives to protect the environment, the culture and the Minorca community. But, we bear in mind that this brand is far more than a logo to show off. The sustainability makes up of our DNA since the very first day we opened up our enterprise. To become a Biosphere Reserve it is not for us only a title. It must be a transversal attitude that impregnates the day to day, every moment and decision.

The sustainability is an essential value nowadays but for our island, this is inescapable.

Ours is a limited, delicate and fragile territory. When our island bet for becoming a Biosphere Reserve, it was already crystal clear that this was the right way ahead.  And we all have maybe taken steps slower than ideal, with not enough persuasion in some moments and vagueness in some others. Whatever, we have now another opportunity to add up efforts and go from the official titles to the facts. It is already making its way.

The enterprises, which have applied for the Biosphere Reserve brand, are fully and publicly engaged to make the sustainability part of our way of being. This commitment is a new starting point, an encouragement to keep adding up. The path towards that sustainability needs each one of us. We can no longer justify our inaction waiting that the Public Administrations pushes us in each step. We should all move ahead, the private sector as well, because the future is alike for each of us and we are all defining it from today onwards.

We have been congratulated for this brand certification and we rejoiced it. But this distinction is not an end of the road but, as we said earlier, an starting point. We do not apply for this brand so as to be congratulated but to be firmly demanded. If we have decided to undertake this path, we will face it with all consequences and requirements. We are not complacent and we cannot be so. We cannot gaze at our navel and think that we are the very best. If this the hidden aim of obtaining the certificate, we will be fully wrong. Every day, when opening the doors of our establishments, we should look at that brand, its logo and recall us the inherent values and requirements and be humbly consistent.

We are already more than 2 dozens of enterprises part of the Minorca Biosphere Reserve brand and hopefully more to come. They should be, they must be more and more in the near term. The brand’s objective is not to commercially position and differentiate enterprises against their competitors based on whether they have or not that brand. It must rather be to pool as many sensible and sensitive producers as possible, because of their good practices in that multi-dimensional sustainability or because they adhere to this way of thinking. We understand that brand as a goal for all the enterprises, which work in Minorca and have conscience of the Minorca identity and idiosyncrasy. And to achieve it, there are doubtlessly different timings and cadences, but what’s essential, again, is that everyone takes on this path. Only the simple step to start out it, it will already change many things and will guarantee certainly a better future.

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