The reservoirs of the internal basins of Catalonia are currently at 17.7% of their capacity. The short-term weather forecasts are not encouraging, which is why the Generalitat assumes that the Ter-Llobregat system will reach 16%, at which point it will have to activate the emergency phase. If nothing changes, it will be in January. The Government has been preparing for this for months and, in this sense, has established measures, added to those already stipulated in the Special Drought Plan, of 2020, to preserve the water supply as much as possible.
They will mainly affect tourism, industry and livestock, but the environmental flows in Muga, Ter and Llobregat will also be reduced. And there are outstanding measures, such as the one that allows irrigation for federated sports and the filling of public and sports swimming pools, “as long as the reduction in consumption is guaranteed through the closing of the showers in the changing rooms, in in order to guarantee access to sport for children and young people”.
These are complementary measures that will try to alleviate in part the 37 months that Catalonia has accumulated with a rainfall regime below the average. The Minister for Climate Action, David Mascort, was in charge yesterday, in a press conference after the meeting of the Executive Council, of taking account of the new restrictions that will be set in the sectors of tourism, intensive livestock, urban planning and industrial uses.
Thus, with regard to tourism and industry, the Generalitat will declare the temporary incompatibility, while the state of emergency lasts, of the growth of projects or the start of activities, which in order to develop with guarantees need a significant use of water, in the tourist, industrial, service, commercial and agro-industry sectors. For the urban planning sector, the Catalan Executive directly warns of the “temporary incompatibility of new urban planning”.
Of course, the procedures for any tourist, industrial or livestock project can go ahead.
With regard to livestock, animal entry authorizations will not be issued for new livestock farms or for the expansion of existing ones. Likewise “the suspension of the opening of new exploitations or the expansion of existing ones will be decreed”.
In addition to these measures, the Generalitat is also proposing others that have to do with the reduction of environmental flows in the Llobregat, the Ter and the Muga. The calculation is that with this decrease more 4.5 hm3 per month will be preserved in the reservoirs and their rate of decline will be reduced to almost half. According to the Government, the slowdown in the loss of reserves would delay the exhaustion of the Ter-Llobregat system by 136 days. And as far as Darnius Boadella is concerned, the depletion of the reservoir would be delayed by 240 days, pending rains in the spring and autumn of 2024.
The Generalitat adds more measures. Of lesser impact, but which he considered important, such as allowing trees located in public spaces to be watered to avoid water stress, which is related to the fall of trees and which has sometimes caused human casualties.
