Promoter of the National Hydrological Plan (PHN) approved in 2001 and still in force, the PP wants to recover the initiative in water management in a context of severe drought like the current one and, two decades later and from the opposition , has brought to Congress a bill to promote a national water pact and a “coherent water policy”, which does not rule out transfers and which will be debated in an upcoming plenary session of the Lower House.
Climate change has shown that the old motto of “water for all” was quite unrealistic, because it is not an inexhaustible resource that can be extracted from one place to take to another and converted overnight per day irrigated dry land. But the PP understands that, in view of the formidable environmental challenge of this century, this “source of environmental and economic wealth” must be “shared”.
And this can be done, says the proposal registered on March 11 by the popular parliamentary group in the Congress of Deputies, without detriment to solidarity and territorial cohesion, making the sustainability and economic development of all the peninsular regions, so different geographically, compatible.
But for this to be possible, “a great political agreement for the future of water” is needed, admits the PP, which recalls in the statement of reasons for its proposal that the PSOE agreed with the road map that the March 2017 was presented to the National Water Council, which contained measures to “ensure the balance and protection of the water environment” and, at the same time, guarantee “attention to the demands of the entire territory”, despite that later, already from the Spanish Government, the president, Pedro Sánchez, and his Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, “ignored and despised the previous work”.
Meanwhile, and in the midst of an unprecedented drought and unpredictable consequences in the Mediterranean basin, where the supply of drinking water in the summer is greatly compromised by the diminishing level of the swamps and the lack of rain, the opposition reaches out to the Executive to address this crisis “from dialogue and consensus” and claims to resume negotiations with the aim of agreeing, with the participation of the autonomous communities and the sectors involved, those investments in sanitation, regulation and use of water to improve the management of water resources, including those destined for irrigation.
“Too much time has been wasted waiting for nature to solve the inefficiencies of the hydraulic policy”, regrets the PP, which, consequently, demands from the central government to continue the planning already planned since the stage of Mariano Rajoy and to prioritize the achievement of a “national consensus”.
As a premise, for the PPcal to “reopen” the negotiation process with the regional governments – not in vain twelve of the seventeen are in their hands, which represents a notable counterweight – and with the irrigators and put on the table “both conventional alternatives as non-conventional”, which is the formula used to include solutions that may affect more than one basin and therefore require rescuing the PHN to suggest a transfer.
On the other hand, the proposal of the PP envisages creating a strategic water network, that is, developing the infrastructures and information systems intended to optimize the management of water resources. And urges the Spanish Government to provide the general budget with sufficient funds to carry out the necessary actions.
