APA vice-president draws worrying comparison between north of Portugal and Algarve
José Pimenta Machado, vice-president of the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA), has warned that climate change is affecting Portugal unevenly and urged for the need to “prepare territories” to better manage its water network to tackle its effects.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday in Viana do Castelo, Pimenta Machado highlighted the different realities experienced in Portugal, stressing that “the climate is indeed changing.”
“On Tuesday I was in the Algarve talking about drought, and in this same country, which is so small yet so different, I’ll give you a number that will startle you: this year, the figures we have for the Lima River show that in 15 days – at the end of October and the first week of November – it rained more than in two years in the Algarve,” the vice-president said, cited by Jornal de Notícias.
“With the same country and such different realities, obviously challenges arise from the point of view of managing our hydrographic network,” he added, warning that a changing climate means “more intense and more frequent storms” and more “concentrated rainfall. We need to prepare the territory for this new reality,” Pimenta Machado said.
Reinforcing his argument that climate change is real, he stressed how “we are in a time of record-breaking temperatures – in January, we had very hot and dry weather – and in terms of precipitation peaks.”
