Algarve environmental awareness group CARE has issued another warning, in the wake of new research (published by The Guardian and the Green to Grey) showing that every day Europe is losing the equivalent of 600 football pitches of cropland and natural areas as countries career forwards on the ‘path to the energy transition’.
“Europe isn’t just losing land, it’s losing track of how much it’s losing (…) At the centre of this transformation stands Portugal, a renewable-energy champion on paper but increasingly a warning on the ground. In its rush to decarbonise, the country is sacrificing biodiversity, farmland, and rural stability to an uncoordinated infrastructure boom”, says CARE.
“With nearly 70% of its electricity now renewable, Portugal is often hailed as a climate leader. In late 2023 it ran entirely on clean power for 149 consecutive hours, a national record. Yet only 18 months later, on April 28, 2025, a cascading blackout left 60 million people across Portugal and Spain without power, revealing how fragile the grid has become under rapid, unbalanced expansion.
“Behind this energy boom lies a darker current. Land hunger. Solar fields swallow the Alentejo plains, wind-farm roads carve through the Serra do Caldeirão, and transmission corridors slice across Natura 2000 sites. Fast-tracked permits and fragmented EIAs (Environmental Impact Assessments) let projects advance with little scrutiny. From a distance the map glows green, up close it’s a mosaic of grey scars”.
“The story doesn’t end with renewables. In the Algarve, Portugal’s first large-scale desalination plant, presented as a response to drought, is (said to be advancing, see below*) after an October 2025 court ruling. Yet the region’s water crisis stems largely from industrial irrigation, which consumes the majority of available water resources and has pushed aquifers and reservoirs below safe thresholds.
“Whether it’s turbines in Caldeirão, solar grids in the Alentejo, or desalination on the coast, the pattern is identical: projects are fast-tracked under the banner of climate urgency, while the land, the law, and public oversight are left behind.
“If this continues, Portugal won’t just exhaust its landscapes, it will exhaust the credibility of its environmental governance”, says the group.
The “green” transition is paradoxically destroying the very systems that sustain it: the landscapes that store carbon, filter water, clean air, and grow food.
“In southern Portugal, protected dunes are being bulldozed for luxury resorts, in the Alentejo solar installations fence off farmland with no duty to restore soil or support local production.
“Individually, such projects may seem minor. Together, they form a continental-scale erosion of nature and territory. At this rate, Europe’s green transition is morphing into a silent land crisis,” says CARE.
“If a nation blessed with sun, wind, and coastline cannot decarbonise without collateral damage, how will denser, more industrialised countries fare?
“To change course,CARE believes Portugal “must ban “green” infrastructure in Natura 2000 and high-value agricultural zones; enforce full EIAs for all projects, including fast-tracked ones; require cumulative-impact and restoration planning, treat rural communities as partners not obstacles and adopt high-resolution land-use accounting to track every hectare lost.
“These are not barriers to progress. They’re the foundations of real sustainability.
“The question is no longer how fast Portugal can build wind farms, solar parks, lithium mines, hydrogen plants, or desalination facilities. It’s what will be left when it does.
“If Portugal reaches net zero by 2045 by paving forests, draining aquifers, degrading air and soil, and sacrificing its last wild places to concrete and glass, the victory will be empty.
“As The Guardian and Green to Grey warn, by the time Europe’s restoration targets come due, there may be no nature left to restore, no soil left to plant, no landscape left to defend, only grey zones where green ambition once stood.
“We have become a species that can re-engineer the Earth, yet one increasingly detached from the soil, water, and living systems that make life possible. If the future keeps trading land and water for “green” progress, ours may be the generation that mistook abundance for permanence.
“A truly green transition must not only cut emissions, it must protect the land, air, and water that sustain life itself.
“Anything less isn’t progress. It’s erasure. And it is turning Europe and Portugal from green to grey.
*Regarding the minister’s statements earlier this week suggesting that the court decision removed the only obstacle to the construction of the desalination plant behind Praia da Falésia beach in Albufeira, environmental lawyer Rui Amores has explained why this is not the case. As he says on the ‘Acção Popular’ Facebook group, “Madam minister, contrary to what you may think, we are in a marathon, not a 100 or 200 metre sprint. A lot of water will flow under this bridge before it flows through the Algarve desalination plant”.
Source material: CARE ( (Committee for Awareness of Responsible Energy), Acção Popular
