The Generalitat Valenciana’s legal profession has filed a contentious-administrative appeal today before the Supreme Court against Royal Decree 35/2023, of January 24, which approves the revision of the hydrological plans of the hydrographic demarcations of the Western Cantabrian, Guadalquivir , Ceuta, Melilla, Segura and Júcar and the Spanish part of the Eastern Cantabrian, Miño-Sil, Duero, Tagus, Guadiana and Ebro river basin districts.
The appeal is directed against the new ninth additional provision that affects the future staggered increase in ecological flows that appear in the Tagus Hydrological Plan.
In its argument, the Generalitat Valenciana considers that Additional Provision 9, in the version delivered to the Council of State and in the version approved by the Council of Ministers, “suppresses the conditionality established in the version delivered to the National Water Council, so that the entry into force of the different steps provided for in the Hydrological Plan will now be automatic, without any link to the monitoring results of the ecological status that were contemplated in the previous version”.
In such a way that “the planned Special Monitoring Plan of the ecological state, contemplated in Additional Provision 9, therefore has a merely informative value, and its results serve only to be considered, where appropriate, in the next cycle of hydrological planning”.
The document also formulates a request for a precautionary measure circumscribed to the staggering forecasts of ecological flows for the years 2026 and 2027 in certain sections of the river; specifically, in all the sections with staggered flows for the years 2026 and 2027 of the Tagus axis between the Bolarque dam or reservoir to the Valdecañas reservoir.
The suspension is requested due to the possibility that there is no judicial pronouncement by sentence, on those dates (2026 and 2027), with respect to the contentious-administrative appeal raised. According to the appeal, in said years, and as long as there is no judicial pronouncement on the flows provided for by the regulatory regulation (regarding their staggering), “the ecological flow of the first section should be maintained, that is, the one initially set for all the hydraulic cycle.
One of the points of the resource refers to “the fundamental impacts derived from the reduction of the Tagus-Segura transfer, considering the implementation of an ecological flow above 7 m³/s and which are included in the approved Plan Report”.
Regarding irrigation, it foresees “a decrease in economic activity of 232 million euros per year, a value that represents 0.6% of the GDP of the Segura Basin demarcation.” And, “the total employment affected directly or indirectly would be around 8,060 workers in the same territorial area.”
Regarding the supply of populations, the document predicts “an increase in urban supply costs of around 16 million euros per year, of which 13.5 million euros would correspond to the area of ??the Segura demarcation and 2.5 million to euros to the rest of the supply demands served from the Segura Demarcation systems but located outside its territorial scope”.
And regarding the patrimonial value of the irrigable surfaces, it indicates that “the patrimonial loss derived from the modification of the nature of irrigation to dry land, according to the 2021 report ‘Legal and patrimonial valuation of the measures related to the ecological flow and exploitation of reservoirs of the Tagus transfer -Segura in the third cycle of hydrological planning’, is estimated at 485 million.
Due to these impacts included in the Memory of the Segura Hydrological Plan, submitted to the National Water Council, “it is considered that the reduction of transferred water has a disproportionate impact from the economic, social and environmental point of view for the hydrographic basin. The best alternative from the economic and social point of view is to maintain the transfer of the Tagus-Segura with an ecological flow of 7 m3/s in Aranjuez”.
Asked about it, President Ximo Puig has assured: “We are going to defend now and always the interests of the irrigators of the Valencian Community”, and has highlighted the effort made by Valencian agriculture in modernization, in reuse and in the responsible use of water.
