Castilla y León has communicated this Thursday that, together with thirteen other autonomous communities, it will undertake legal actions against the Government after the deadline for the Ministry for Ecological Transition to send the six-year reports on the conservation status of various species of community interest, including the Iberian wolf, to the European Commission expired in July 2025.
To be able to move forward with that report, the meeting of the Sectoral Conference on the Environment, which must be convened when at least one third of the communities request it, is essential. This condition has been met on several occasions, specifically on July 21 and 24, 2025, and last May 5, without the Ministry having given any response.
Given the lack of a meeting, the autonomous communities announce new lawsuits against the Ministry for violating both Spanish and European legislation, since the Executive, like the rest of the member states, is obliged to inform the European Commission every six years about the situation of protected species. That deadline concluded on July 25 of last year.
The process to approve the report was initiated on July 16, 2025, when the State Commission for Natural Heritage and Biodiversity approved a proposal for its submission to the Sectoral Conference on the Environment. That meeting was scheduled for July 22, 2025, but was suspended by the Ministry the previous day, "without justification," according to the Junta.
Subsequently, on July 21 and 24, 2025, the communities of Castilla y León, Galicia, Andalusia, Cantabria, La Rioja, Region of Murcia, Valencian Community, Aragon, Extremadura, Balearic Islands, Madrid, and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla formally requested the extraordinary convening of the Sectoral Conference.
The Ministry dismissed these requests, which even led to some communities initiating judicial proceedings that are still pending resolution.
Later, Canarias joined this common front, and all of them reiterated the request for an urgent meeting on May 5. The absence of a response from the Ministry has now prompted all these administrations to initiate new legal actions to demand that Spain comply with its legal obligations regarding natural heritage and biodiversity.
On previous occasions, the Ministry for Ecological Transition has offered different arguments to explain its refusal, including that the fires recorded in 2025 could affect the content of the report, despite the fact that the document is limited to evaluating the period 2019-2024.
The latest reason put forward by the Ministry, according to a press release issued this Wednesday, is that the European Union would require the presence of 500 wolf packs in Spain to consider that the species is in a favorable conservation status, while there are currently 333.
The autonomous communities reject this approach and maintain that the European Commission has never officially set this threshold.