Geoethical education: A critical issue for geoconservation

appropriate management to safeguard it and, if particularly vulnerable, preservation for education, research and enjoyment of present and future generations. Many geological sites are permanently threatened, even if they are included in protected sites (e.g. This can be due to the fact that rocks are to many people a fixed, unnoticed and uninteresting background to the biosphere, for which protection measures are irrelevant. Conservation regulation and management plans are often primarily based on biodiversity and ecological criteria, causing a lack of effective tools to take actions to prevent destruction of geological heritage. Over the last two decades, great efforts have been made to promote the recognition of the geological heritage as an important part of natural and cultural heritage. However, when examining current protection plans and nature conservation policies, limitations of their efficacy in geoconservation become evident. For instance, this problem can be detected in the framework given by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN has established several categories of protected areas which have significance for setting management plans (Dudley, 2008), and these are based on principles that are systematically biased towards biodiversity aspects. It is important to notice that the IUCN is the advisory body for natural heritage nominations to the UNESCO World Heritage List (http:// whc.unesco.org/en/guidelines). Specifically targeted for geoheritage is the Global Geoparks Network, a UNESCO supported initiative which aims to stimulate sustainable economic and cultural development of a region based on the presence of significant geological sites (http://www.globalgeopark.org/, Global Geoparks Network, 2010). However, only geosites that are large enough to serve local/regional economic and cultural development can be included in this category. Nevertheless, integrated conservation and management plans seem to represent an adequate strategy to protect the rather common sites where geological heritage is associated with other natural and/or cultural values. In this context, geoconservation, as a sum of strategies related to the assessment and conservation of the geological heritage, must serve to strengthen the implementation of geological criteria in these integrated management plans. However, highly significant and valuable geological sites do not need to be included in protected areas to deserve conservation.