Andalusian Govt to allow illegal Water theft from dying Donaña water park to counter Fascist anti Climate Campaign

from thefreeonline on Apr 17, 2023 by Eldiario / Wikipedia. / Stigmatis…

As the epic drought bites and the Sahara creeps north most of the lagoons have disappeared in Donaña and Europe’s greatest National Park is becoming a desert.. Even so the regional rightwing PP plans to legalize the longrunning illegal extraction of water from the iconic Park for strawberry farming, golf, industry and urbanization.

Flamingos walk through a completely dry lagoon in a ‘wetland’ in La Puebla del Río (Seville) next to the Doñana Natural Area. EFE/ José Manuel Vidal/

The director of the Doñana Biological Station (EBD-CSIC), Eloy Revilla, assured last Monday that the Doñana Natural Area is currently “in critical condition”, since “more than half of its lagoons have disappeared”.

Ironically Moreno’s PP goverment swept to power in Andalusia in “2022 on a green anti Climate Change and Donaña protection ticket.

But now the fascist Vox party has stirred up a virulent rural campaign blaming all woes on Climate Change restrictions which threaten the billionaire interests of the ‘greenhouse cities’.

The moguls who control both the PP and rival Vox feared that the ‘green agenda’ could stymie expansion of irrigation for export, not only around Donaña, but across Andalusia, and especially in Almeria which supplies half Europe with unsustainable production with migrant labour.

The Almeria Greenhouses – Killing the Environment and its Workers

The PP’s green agenda is now portrayed as an evil threat to unsustainable irrigated cultivation of the Axarquía in Malaga, as well as Almería and Granada, two of the provinces where the conservative vote prevails, and where the PP was hegemonic until Vox burst in with a denialist discourse on climate change, engulfing many votes and support from the traditional right.

The Donaña eco-system has been under constant threat for decades by the draining of the marshes, the use of river water to boost agricultural production by irrigating land along the coast, water pollution by upriver mining, and the expansion of tourist facilities.

In the latest study published in the scientific journal Science of The Total Environment, the data confirms that 59% of the largest lagoons in Doñana have not flooded since at least 2013.

The war has been opened for water that does not exist, in a land without rain for months, in critical condition due to drought and with reservoirs at 25% of their capacity. In this brawl, the PP and PSOE are struggling, but also farmers with irrigation rights in the area of Doñana and farmers without that license, who have been depleting the National Park aquifer for years, and aspire to regularize their situation with this law.

The Spanish Lynx is threatend with extinction by irrigation forn export.

It is a war between mayors of all political signs in the area -also socialists-, who are risking re-election in a few weeks; It is a struggle between irrigators, strawberry businessmen, merchants, distributors and the entire commercial chain of Huelva’s red fruit, which represents 97% of the national production.

The Vox ultras are waging a cultural war in the countryside – promoting bullfighting, hunting, unlimited meat production, and the rejection of the environmental commitments of the 2030 agenda –

Th fascist strategy of volunteers distributed in small municipalities, with more than of a thousand inhabitants, to make themselves visible to the most discontented group they could find.

The vertigo of the Andalusian PP, given this perspective, has mired Moreno’s “green revolution” in the illegal irrigation of Doñana: 1,500 million in hydrological investments for the promise of the “water legislature”, which the local leaders of the PP have started to disassemble

The proposal to pardon irrigation next to the National Park is a specific law for specific plots and, in the opinion of the Almería farmers who rushed to Parliament 24 hours after the debate, this formula can also be valid for the greenhouses of the West.

These changes are significantly related to the temperature and precipitation of each year, but also to the extension of cultivated areas, the constructed area in Matalascañas, the distance to the urbanization pumping stations and the operation of the golf course.

Alteration of the lagoons

According to the data, 80% of these lagoons dried up earlier than expected due to observed precipitation and temperature, and 84% had a smaller flood area than predicted based on the same parameters, indicating that Human activity is altering the natural balance of the lagoons.

“In Mediterranean systems, droughts are recurrent, but when the succession of years without flooding exceeds this recurrence, the vegetation of the lagoons disappears and they are colonized by terrestrial vegetation, which ends with the complete disappearance of the lagoons and the loss of the habitats cataloged by the Directive”, Revilla explained.

He specified that this is what has happened with 19% of the lagoons sampled in the study, which have already completely disappeared.

In addition, another 19% have more than half of their basin invaded by scrub and pines and only 10%, mainly located on the vera, remain in good condition.

For their part, the three lagoons that functioned as permanent, that is, those that did not dry up in summer, as is the case with the vast majority of Doñana lagoons, have ceased to be so. For example, the lagoons of El Sopetón and La Dulce, which only occasionally dried up, now dry up frequently.

The situation of Santa Olalla, the largest permanent lagoon in Doñana, has been extreme in the summer of 2022, in which it completely dried up.

Repercussion on fauna and vegetation

This situation is having repercussions on the fauna and vegetation of Doñana, for example, the richness of amphibian species has decreased from an average of 4.3 species per km² in 2003 to 2.5 per km² in 2021.

The situation of the two species of turtles native to the Iberian Peninsula is also worrying, both included in the European red lists, as well as that of other groups such as dragonflies and damselflies; or fish, of which Doñana preserves endangered species, such as tusks or eels.

The critical situation of these habitats is also having negative repercussions for the conservation of aquatic plants, especially those associated with lagoons with a long hydroperiod, some of which have a very restricted distribution and are threatened.

Urbanismo y regadío están secando Doñana: ¿hay solución?

Lack of political will

Regarding the bill presented by the PP and supported by Vox, which will be debated this Wednesday in the Andalusian Parliament, he has made it clear that “the current exploitation of the aquifer is not sustainable.

More resources are being extracted than are regenerated annually through precipitation recharge, which is variable and decreasing, which is why this natural resource is being depleted.”

In his opinion, there is a “clear lack of political will” when it comes to solving the problem that has led “to the unsustainable critical point in which Doñana finds itself.”

For Revilla, the need to provide water to other farms makes it even more difficult to urgently solve the problem: “Doñana’s current situation is critical and does not allow us to wait another decade for decisions to adjust the demand for water to the availability ”.

In his intervention, he offered some guidelines to prevent further degradation of the natural space, such as urgently reducing the amount of water that is extracted from the aquifer to levels that allow the start of its recovery; update the aquifer status assessment system, and urgently restore Governance in the exploitation and management of water and soil in Doñana and its region.

Las sequías repentinas, cada vez más frecuentes y se prevé que se aceleren

Más de la mitad de las lagunas de Doñana han desaparecido, según el CSIC