A landmark agreement one of to protect Europe’s most important wetlands stressed the importance of harnessing public opinion to drive the green transition and help mitigate the effects of the climate emergency, the country’s environment minister said.
The Doñana in western Andalusia – whose marshes, forests and dunes cover almost 130,000 hectares (320,000 acres) and a National park on the UNESCO list – has been at the center of a furious national and international row in recent years.
Water supply to the park has declined drastically over the past three decades due to climate intrusion, mining pollution, marsh drainage – and the boom in soft fruit growing.
An agreement signed in November by Spain’s environment minister, Teresa Ribera, for €1.4bn (£1.2bn) investment to help protect the area and diversify the local economy however, away from his reliance on soft fruit provided a glimmer of hope. It was a year in which a plan by the Andalusian regional government for an amnesty for the farmers who illegally tapped its aquifer irrigate strawberry farms in the area around the park has led to serious warnings from environmental groups, the European Union and supermarket chains.
Speaking to the Guardian, Ribera said the agreement was the result of internal and external pressure, a change in public opinion and a concerted effort to engage with people in the region to explain the need for urgent action.
“There’s more to a future than strawberries and raspberries,” Ribera said. “And anyway, if you don’t look at the water, there won’t be any more strawberries or raspberries. I think that this change of mentality needs a very clear understanding.”
A report earlier this year of Spain’s National Research Council noted that 59% of Doñana’s large lakes had not been full since at least 2013, and that the area was in a “critical state”. The past two summers, Doñana’s largest permanent lake has dried up completely and the park was recently removed from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s green list because it did not meet the necessary standards.
The proposed increase in irrigable land also led to a group of leading UK supermarkets – including Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Lidl, Aldi and Morrisons – writing to the Andalusian regional president warning him that the move danger of damaging “the reputation and the long-term development of the region”..
Ribera said that persuading people of the need to integrate environmental action into social and economic policy is essential to global efforts to deal with the climate emergency.
“It is very important that we learn to combine strict environmental measures with measures to reduce economic and social pressure in the area when it comes to green infrastructure and the restoration of natural spaces,” said Ribera. “You have to turn that relationship into a virtuous relationship in which the people there have alternatives that will allow them to be proud of where they live and not see those alternatives as a limitation or a threat.”
She said getting that message across was “the big challenge for Europe in the very short term – and for the world as a whole”, adding that “decades-old perceptions” about the importance of integrated environmental policy were no longer valid. not.
“It’s very complicated and requires more than just engineering logic or economic projections,” she said. “It requires very important social participation and a cultural and emotional change when it comes to behavior. If we do not properly manage this change in collective psychology and social values, we will end up with gilets jaunes and with farmers in the Netherlands conflicting land protection rules. We will end up with complicated situations because people don’t know what it will mean for their lives in the very short term.”
The minister said the European elections in 2024 would be crucial in maintaining the momentum and ensuring that hard-fought environmental gains are not lost.
“This change for all of us is going to be so intense that none of us can miss the boat of the June election,” she said. “It’s much harder to do that in a hostile environment.”
Ribera also took aim at political parties that engage in “very dangerous demagoguery” and seek to dismiss the realities of the climate emergency for cynical electoral gain.
“There are many anti-systemic forces that are trying to break or question this agenda,” she said. “I think there is a lot of hypocritical behavior: I don’t believe this environmental or climate skepticism or denial is because they doubt the analytical abilities of academics; I have absolutely no doubt that this is not the case… [But it] really worry me We need to consolidate, explain and provide alternatives – and this can only be done with a very important social conviction and commitment.”
The minister also said that politicians who did not heed shifting public opinion on environmental matters will pay the price. She describes Madrid’s city council’s decision to cut down hundreds of trees in two popular parks to make way for an expansion of the capital’s metro system as “an absolute disgrace”.
Although she has no powers to stop the move as the decision was made at the municipal and regional level, Ribera said she would write to regional ministers to propose a set of common guidelines to protect mature urban trees.
“Planting two six-month-old saplings is not the same as having trees that are 60 or 80 years old,” she said. “I can’t explain it: it’s like the anti-cycle lane mania of some new mayors. It’s a scandal and I think it will have a much higher social and political cost than they thought – they will go through what Moreno Bonilla went through with Doñana.”
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