Coinciding with the serious drought that Catalonia is suffering, one step away from entering the emergency phase due to water shortage in the reservoirs, 35 environmental and social organizations have reproached the Government this Saturday for its lack of “courage” when applying restrictions more severe measures on the economic sectors that use the most water and have urged them to make their consumption data public.
If the situation does not improve, the forecast is that the metropolitan area of ??Barcelona and part of Girona will enter the emergency phase around February 1. And the reason that justifies them is that the swamps in the internal basins are at 16.1% of their capacity in Catalan territory.
To try to find solutions, around thirty environmental, social, university and neighborhood organizations met this Saturday in Arbúcies (Girona) within the framework of the third edition of the Social Water Summit. A meeting in which the participating entities propose alternative proposals to the model used by the Generalitat and the city councils to face the serious drought that affects Catalonia. The entities have taken advantage of the summit to denounce that the Government acts with “opacity” with respect to large water consumers, as the spokesperson for Aigua és Vida, Dante Maschio, warned in statements to the press.
Although the Generalitat’s drought plan establishes different restrictions for large water consumers, such as agriculture, livestock and industry, the entities denounce that the Government does not publish its consumption data or the savings achieved. However, Maschio has welcomed the Government’s moratorium on new economic activities that make intensive use of water – such as new tourism and recreational projects – but has warned that “it arrives late and is insufficient to save water.”
Furthermore, he is concerned that the minimum circulating flows of the Ter, Llobregat and Muga are being reduced by “more than half”, while at the same time the restrictions on large consumers are not sufficiently tightened, in the opinion of the Aigua és Vida spokesperson. .
Although the scientific community has long warned that the climate crisis entails water scarcity, the spokesperson for the Ter Defense Group, Dolors Catalán, has denounced for her part that the Generalitat has chosen to continue promoting an economic model based ” in the increase in tourism and the export of meat and fruit”. In this sense, she has lamented the Government’s “lack of courage” in the face of large consumers, who have “an infinite thirst but water is finite.”
The organizations question whether the Government relies on more desalination and regeneration plants for the future self-sufficiency of the Barcelona metropolitan area, on the horizon of 2030. If this is not accompanied by a reduction in global water consumption, it generates “a false sense of availability that overshadows the need for structural measures that focus on the progressive reduction of water demand, starting with the sectors that consume the most,” Catalán warned.
The entities have also highlighted the responsibility of the municipalities in the drought, for not fixing the leaks, installing ice rinks at Christmas time or not properly controlling domestic and urban consumption.
