By Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, Feb 15 2006 (IPS)

There is little good news on the environmental front in Portugal, which has been afflicted by severe drought and forest fires for nearly three years, and is making poor progress towards climate change goals.

Between 2003 and 2005, a total of 900,000 hectares of forests burned down in Portugal.

And climatic extremes are being observed with increasing frequency. The central and southern parts of the country saw snow in late January, for the first time in 53 years.

In the meantime, meteorologists have forecast another unusually hot summer, which will inevitably be accompanied by a new wave of forest fires.

Despite the rain and quick-melting snow that fell last month, drought continues to plague most parts of the country, especially the northern region of Tras-os-Montes and the southern region of Alentejo, with the consequent damages to agriculture and stockbreeding.

As if that were not enough, early this month the government of socialist Prime Minister José Sócrates admitted, exactly one year after the Kyoto Protocol went into effect, that Portugal would not meet its climate change targets.

The United States, however, which is responsible for 25 percent of such emissions, is notably absent from the agreement, because President George W. Bush withdrew the U.S. signature from the pact in 2001, shortly after he took office.

According to the targets set by the Protocol, industrialised signatory nations are to cut emissions to five percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Countries failing to live up to the targets face possible penalties. However, they are allowed to buy tradable pollution credits generated by companies meeting targets or by investing in the Clean Development Mechanism.

In Portugal, there seems to be no solution in sight for failure to comply with the treaty. The latest assessment carried out under the National Plan for Climate Change (PNAC) indicated earlier this month that in the most optimistic scenario, Portugal’s emissions in 2010 will be nine percent higher than the permitted level.

Among the factors playing the greatest role in the lack of compliance are new projects that will have a significant impact in terms of emissions of greenhouse gases, such as a giant new oil refinery in construction in Sines, 120 km south of Lisbon, which will spew out 2.5 megatons of carbon dioxide (CO2).

The lack of certainty surrounding a plan for reforestation of the areas that have gone up in flames over the last three years is another element fuelling the pessimism of environmentalists.

Expert in environmental affairs Ana Fernándes said that to live up to its targets, “the country will have no other alternative than to buy emission credits,” at a cost of 14.40 dollars per ton over five years, for a total of 396 million dollars.

Fernándes said the “big culprits” are the transportation industry, whose emissions will be 105 percent higher in 2010 than in 1990, and the residential and tertiary sectors, major consumers of fossil fuels whose emissions will be 86 percent higher in 2010 than in 1990. By comparison, emissions by the construction industry and the industrial sector overall will be 40 percent higher.

Among the measures announced by the government are new rules to ensure energy efficiency in new buildings, such as the inclusion of solar panels. Portugal has an average of 300 days of sunshine, and 60 percent of all electricity is consumed in buildings, while 30 percent of imported fossil fuel goes towards that sector.

The executive decree is the result of an EU directive on the “energy performance of buildings,” which requires member states to take major steps towards energy efficiency in that sector.

Although the decree could drive up the cost of apartments, “the country hopes to save energy obtained from fossil fuels while simultaneously creating a new market that could give a boost to Portuguese industry and know-how,” said Fernándes.

Helder Gonçalves, a researcher at the National Institute for Engineering, Technology and Innovation, said the savings “could be quite significant, up to 50 percent compared to housing built without the requisites stipulated by this regulation.” Further, he said, power bills will be around 20 percent lower in the new energy efficient housing units.

The new regulations could bring about a veritable revolution in the building industry, “where the main problem to be resolved is for people in Portugal to stop living in houses that perform worse than the climate: they are hotter in the summertime and colder in winter,” said Eduardo Oliveira Fernándes, a professor at the University of Oporto, one of the authors of the new “environmentally-friendly” measures.

Other steps designed to fight the increasing environmental deterioration will be taken at the municipal government level in Lisbon and Oporto, Portugal’s two biggest cities, which together are home to over one-third of the country’s 10.2 million people.

The creation and expansion of so-called “urban green corridors”, aimed at improving the quality of life in cities, is crucial, said architect Paulo Farinha Marques, a Science Department professor at the University of Oporto.

Climate change, which brings “irregularities in rainfall patterns, with drier, longer summers and the loss of sources of freshwater, will make life in large cities less healthy, hence making measures to improve quality of life necessary.”

“Green corridors contribute to reducing temperature swings by increasing relative humidity and generating breezes,” said the professor.

But despite the alarming reports issued by local environmental organisations, Portugal ranked high in environmental performance, on an index produced by experts at Yale and Columbia Universities in the United States.

In the Pilot 2006 Environmental Performance Index, presented at the Jan. 25-29 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Portugal ranked 11th out of 133 countries.

Topping the scorecard were New Zealand and Sweden, while Niger and Chad brought up the rear.

Spain, which occupies 80 percent of the Iberian Peninsula, across the border from Portugal, was in 23rd place on the index, which the Portuguese non-governmental organisation Quercus described as “not a close approximation to reality.”

The index identified targets for environmental performance and measured how well each country met the goals. To do so, it tracked 16 indicators from six different policy categories: environmental health, air quality, water resources, biodiversity and habitat, productive natural resources, and sustainable energy.

According to the index, Portugal met the goals established for drinking water and sanitation systems 100 percent.

In other words, for the Yale and Columbia researchers, there is universal access to piped water and sewage is adequately treated throughout Portugal. But Quercus maintained that “these indicators do not reflect reality.”

“More than 50 percent of sewage is not properly treated, and with respect to surface water like rivers, one-third is of poor or very poor quality,” said Hélder Spínola, president of Quercus, citing official statistics.

The activist also asserted that many sewage treatment systems in Portugal fail to live up to EU standards.

Spínola said that only 70 percent of the population actually has access to basic sanitation.

He also countered the index’s “positive” score for Portugal in the area of environmental health, saying “air quality has serious implications for public health, and Portugal does not yet even have a national plan on health and the environment.”

The index’s results “run counter to studies by other bodies, such as the European Environment Agency,” said Spínola. He blamed the “distortions” on the indicators used by the researchers, from United Nations sources, which he said did not accurately reflect “the reality in Europe.”

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