PAS believes that the negative impact of the project is “not justifiable”
Portugal’s Sustainable Water Platform (PAS) has expressed its opposition to supply the Algarve with water collected from the Guadiana River at Pomarão, in the Alentejo municipality of Mértola.
The public stance against the project comes less than one week after environmental organisation Zero already said it was against the project.
“Carrying out a major engineering project, with huge ecosystem and social impacts, to allow an increase in the size of intensive and polluting agriculture that is wasteful of a scarce resource such as water, which all studies indicate will be even more so in the future, is not justifiable,” says the platform, which brings together thirteen organisations.
The project, which was available for public consultation until last week, involves taking surface water from the River Guadiana near the village of Mesquita upstream of Pomarão and building a pipeline to the Odeleite reservoir in the municipality of Castro Marim (Algarve).
According to PAS, the Algarve Water Efficiency Plan (PREHA) indicates that the collection of water from the Guadiana downstream from Alqueva is intended to create conditions for the proposed new irrigation schemes located in the Beliche-Odeleite system.
However, the platform believes that authorities are moving forward with the project in the wrong way. According to PAS, presenting this project without the ‘okay’ from Spain and the Alqueva Development and Infrastructure Company (EDIA) is “irresponsible, both in terms of wasting time, squandering opportunities and wasting public money on paying for the project’s design”.
“Only after guaranteeing that those cross-border and national constraints would be overcome could the Portuguese state have gone ahead with analysing this possibility and studying its environmental impact,” says PAS.
The platform also states that the project will “waste” a large public investment in a “solution” that depends on “rainfall, which is scarce, and electricity, which is increasingly expensive and impactful to produce.”
Instead, PAS believes that the money would be put to better use by restoring ecosystems to guarantee the conditions for atmospheric water vapour to condense in the mountains and fall as rain.
“If this investment is maintained, the first and only priority should be local domestic supply and, whenever necessary, domestic supply to the Algarve region, thus excluding other purposes, namely intensive irrigated agriculture,” it says.
PAS is a platform that brings together thirteen associations, non-governmental organisations and environmental movements, mainly from the Algarve.
The Pomarão water catchment is one of the measures envisaged in the Algarve’s Regional Water Efficiency Plan, for which €200 million are earmarked from Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (PPR), in addition to the future desalination plant, the production of water for reuse and the reduction of water losses in the urban sector.
Source: LUSA
