ENVIRONMENT-SPAIN: Desertification Threatens One-Third of Territory

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Jun 25 2004 (IPS) - The government of Spain is investing heavily in restoring land and in other environmental efforts to fight desertification, which threatens 31.5 percent of Spanish territory.

Among the planned measures are reforestation, forest conservation, improved vegetation coverage and demarcation of coastlines and riverbanks to prevent illegal construction activity that contributes to erosion, Environment Minister Cristina Narbona told IPS.

The high-water mark has been officially delimited for just one percent of the thousands of kilometres of riverbanks in Spain, and 60 percent of the seacoast, said Narbona.

However, merely delimiting the high-water mark does not solve the problem, says Ecologists in Action, an umbrella group of hundreds of non-governmental organisations. There are more than 40,000 illegal constructions – houses, apartment buildings, camps, sports fields and even schools – in areas at high risk of flooding, according to the group.

Tourism is Spain’s leading source of revenue. This southern European country of 41 million attracts more than 55 million visitors each year, particularly in the summer months.

But it is tourism that has the greatest negative impacts on Spain’s shoreline, whether on the Atlantic in the north, the Canary Islands off the western coast of Africa, or along the Mediterranean Sea.

”Unregulated urban expansion has overburdened the capacity of the coastal systems and there is overcrowding of tourist locations,” says Fernando Prats, an urban planning architect and director of several environmental projects.

Minister Narbona has planted the seeds in the government for a measure that could help stop unregulated growth and construction, fighting the widely used trick of setting forest fires then applying to municipal governments for permits to build on the degraded land.

She is proposing a law that would establish a minimum 30-year waiting period before the official classification of a plot of land could be changed.

Another environmental problem facing the new government of socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is widespread freshwater shortages in a country with a strong farming tradition. Eighty percent of Spain’s water resources go to the agricultural sector.

This level of consumption has made Spain fourth in the world in terms of the number of large dams, with more than 1,200. No river in this country runs freely from beginning to end.

The Zapatero government’s reversal of the previous administration’s decision to divert the course of the Ebro River is one of the most important and controversial steps it has taken regarding the question of water supplies.

The Ebro begins in the Cantabria mountains, along Spain’s northern coast, and runs 928 km -with a watershed of 84,000 square km – before flowing into the Mediterranean on the northeast coast in Catalonia.

The Ebro is the country’s second biggest river, moving 614 cubic metres of water per second, and its delta covers 320 square km.

The previous government, of the centre-right José María Aznar, gave the green light to divert the river as far as 1,000 km to the south in order to bring water to Valencia and Murcia, two of the 17 autonomous communities into which Spain is broken up, which are governed by Aznar’s fellow Popular Party members.

Narbona thinks it would be ”absurd ” to reroute the river to that extent, also taking into account that the water would have to be pumped to an altitude of 1,000 metres to get over a mountainous zone along the proposed route.

In addition to hurting the Ebro delta and the areas that currently use its water, and the cost of 900 km of canals and pipeline, ”it is a threat to Spain’s environmental health,” she said.

The alternative put forth by the Zapatero government is to build desalinisation plants to produce potable water from the Mediterranean, to provide just over one billion cubic metres of water to Valencia, Murcia, Catalonia and Andalusia, with an outlay of more than 3.0 billion euros (3.7 billion dollars).

Critics of the measure, with the Valencia and Murcia government the most outspoken, say that the salt removed from the seawater would be dumped back into the Mediterranean creating highly toxic deposits.

The minister rejected that argument saying that the problem is being taken into account in the desalinisation plans.

The aim, she said, is ”to prevent the waste of resources and to ensure the stability of a more balanced and sustainable development agreed amongst all the territories that would have been affected by the diversion of the Ebro.”

The governor of Murcia, Ramón Luis Valcárcel, considers the construction of desalinisation plants a positive thing, but only as a complement to diverting the Ebro, a plan he continues to pursue.

The dispute could be taken to the Constitutional Court on claims that the central government cannot by decree annul the law – although the law for the Ebro plan itself was a decree issued by Aznar.