If nothing and no one remedies it, the fact that Africa begins in the Pyrenees will be a reality, at least from a climatic point of view, at some point in this century. And the absence of precipitation and the scarcity of available water reserves make up the perfect storm for the south of the continent to appear on the precipice of desertification. According to the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), 74% of the Spanish territory (nine million hectares) is already located in arid or semi-arid lands. A threat that is shared by other southern countries such as Portugal, Italy, Greece, Malta, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania.

Decrease in harvests and productive land, problems with drinking water supply, loss of biodiversity, degradation of soil and forest resources or rural depopulation are just some of the consequences of this process that is ascending inexorably across Europe. How did we get to this situation? Climate change is first on the list of suspects. Without knowing the data for 2023, the summer of 2022 was the hottest in history in Europe, with an average temperature of 1.34 degrees Celsius above the average for the period between 1991 and 2020, according to Copernicus data. the Earth Observation Program of the European Union.

To this extreme heat we must add a change in the precipitation pattern. “Almost all indicators point to less rain and a different seasonality,” warns Rafael Seiz, Water Policy Coordinator at WWF Spain. Why is this a problem? “Because our reservoir and aquifer systems have periods in which the resources are used and periods in which they are recharged. But the new patterns will mean that the amount of water that we previously received in months or even throughout an entire year could now arrive concentrated in the form of torrential rains in very short periods of time. This will make our water reserves much more uncertain,” says this expert.

But meteorological imbalances are not the only cause of desertification of the territory. The overexploitation of water resources for all types of industrial uses, the contamination of aquifers, the abuse of intensive irrigated agriculture (80% of water resources in Spain are used for agricultural activity), the abandonment of agricultural lands. cultivation, the growth of cities, mass tourism or a society not sufficiently sensitized about the need to sustainably manage water are other factors that greatly aggravate the water crisis. “The soil acts like an immense sponge, but for it to function as such, there needs to be a certain amount of vegetation that retains water and allows it to circulate slowly through it. Soil degradation causes it to lose this capacity. If there are no roots, the water does not infiltrate and does not feed the aquifers,” explains Seiz.

In 2021, the European Commission presented a Soil Strategy with which, among other objectives, it seeks to reverse the degradation of surfaces, the loss of biodiversity and desertification. The strategy, which is part of the European Green Deal to stop climate change, contemplates actions such as sharing knowledge, mobilizing social commitment or deploying the necessary financial resources. Spain is one of the countries marked in red in this section, the only one in Europe in which, according to data managed by the European Drought Observatory, the drought has not subsided in the last year. In our country, in July 2022, the Government approved the National Strategy to Combat Desertification (ENLD), which, among other measures, proposed a restoration plan for land affected by desertification or the preparation of a Conservation and Use Law. sustainable soil management, a law that, for the moment, has not seen the light of day. Apart from these proposals, the Executive has allocated 12,000 million euros in the last year to promote the desalination and reuse of water, to which we must add another 3,060 million from the PERTE for digitalization of the water cycle and 2,130 million more for the irrigation modernization.

While the heavy legal and administrative machinery is put into operation, necessity forces us to look for other practical formulas that help alleviate the problem of the dry land that the once lush European landscape is becoming. The Earth’s water scarcity refers to fresh water. On the other hand, salt water (97.5% of the total) is in abundance. It is easy to infer, therefore, that the transformation of seawater into drinking water would solve a good part of the supply problems. Such an alchemy exists, it is called desalination or desalination and it consists of heating the water until it evaporates, to then condense it and thus obtain fresh water.

It is estimated that Europe has a capacity to desalinate 8.7 million m3/day (9% of the world’s capacity), with the El Prat or Torrevieja plants as European references. The high economic and environmental costs of this type of installation are, however, the main obstacle to this solution. The transformation is also the basis of a solution that is directly linked to the circular economy: wastewater regeneration. This consists of giving a second life to water from domestic, commercial, industrial or public services consumption.

Other ways to save water are solar pumps, composting, drip irrigation or air capture of water. And in many of them, digitalization plays a prominent role. Technologies such as AI, the Internet of Things or big data already make it possible to monitor crops, analyze water resources, create predictive models that anticipate possible adverse climate episodes or failures in management systems and propose solutions in real time. Two water management instruments launched by the European Commission move along the same lines of prevention and resilience against drought: the European Drought Impact Database and the European Drought Risk Atlas. What more can be done to prevent dunes from covering the continental landscape? Before giving his recipe, Rafael Seiz reminds us that the problem of drought should not be confused with that of the scarcity of water resources. “The first is a climate phenomenon and there is not much we can do about it. On the other hand, with the second we do have all the capacity to adopt effective measures,” he assures.