The environmental organizations of Catalonia have demanded that the Catalan parties, once a new Government is formed, restore the Department of Medi Ambient (disappeared in 2010) and give it the rank of Vice-Presidency. These entities speak of “setbacks” in environmental management in Catalonia, accuse the latest governments of converting the environmental crisis into mere “advertising” and maintain that the lack of a department for the ecological transition that is independent and not “subordinated” to the policies of agriculture or urban planning “further aggravates the serious environmental crisis enhanced by climate change.”
These entities request that the new Environmental Medication Department have “strong competencies and the ability to execute and coordinate actions in the most efficient and transversal way.”
“In this way, all of the Government’s action can be directed towards combating the environmental and climate crisis, which means planning and executing actions with environmental criteria,” they argue.
All this is expressed in a manifesto, signed by the Nature Conservation Network, Depana, Ecologists in Action, SEO BirdLife and the Catalan Environmental Federation. More than 200 entities support this manifesto because many of these entities are platforms that bring together other small organizations
The manifesto calls for overcoming an organizational scheme in which the configuration of the Executiu de Catalunya means that environmental powers have been “subordinated to other antagonistically incompatible ones, such as those of productivist agriculture (agribusiness)”, as they say, referring to the current situation. , or to an “expansionist urbanism”.
They consider that the recovery of this department, with the rank of vice-presidency, would guarantee sectoral integration in a transversal manner (economic policy, territorial planning, agriculture, hunting and fishing, tourism…)
The diagnosis of all of them is that in Catalonia, the absence of a Medi Ambient department “has contributed to a long period of environmental regression” at a time in which the need for a radical change “that cannot be “is limited to reducing the impact of the productive system, but can also address the global challenges of climate change and the construction of new social, economic and ecological models.”
“Catalonia has gone from leading environmental policies in the period that we had the Department of Environmental Medicine to drastically regressing in environmental attention and awareness regarding the countries and communities around us,” they maintain.
These entities add that “Catalonia is currently suffering environmental destruction due to submission to economic policies of insatiable use of finite resources and predation of the territory” and maintain that “the lack of an independent Medi Ambient department, with the capacity to take measures effective and relevant to solve the challenges we have as a country, further aggravates the serious environmental crisis enhanced by climate change that affects us more every day.
In this diagnosis they refer to the “abusive use and the terrible and erratic management of water”, the “verified loss of biodiversity”, the increase in pollution, the “inability to prevent the growth of waste” and the lack of control in management, growth and urban speculation.
They also allude to “the impacts of a tourism model and an unsustainable agroindustry and livestock system, the lack of investments in sustainable mobility and public transportation, the lack of a policy to promote non-speculative renewable energies without impacts on the territory”. All of this, they maintain, has been “the result of governments where the environmental crisis has not been a priority but simply publicity.”
Since 2010, when the Department of Medi Ambient was eliminated, conservation and environmental groups, as well as leading academics in environmental matters, have insistently and repeatedly maintained their demand in favor of recovering this department.