Environment minister highlights “restoring nature”
In words which may end up being used against her, environment minister Maria de Graça Carvalho has given a speech today in which she claims: “Portugal is ushering in a new era of sustainable development”.
“Our main environmental priority is restoring nature”, she told her audience during the presentation of Sociedade RiaViva e Litoral da Região de Aveiro (The RiaViva and Coastal Society of the Aveiro Region) (formerly Sociedade Polis Litoral Ria de Aveiro), which aims to “give continuity to coastal and lagoon protection interventions, the restoration of rivers, the preservation of biodiversity and the promotion of sustainable fishing in the Ria de Aveiro”.
Interventions planned for this region “are perfectly in line with the government’s objectives, namely objectives arising from the European Nature Restoration Act,” she went on, extolling the funding (‘investment capacity’) “guaranteed by the fundamental and other important national and European funds, and the strategy that will be guaranteed to us by the National Restoration Plan”.
Ms Carvalho added that the government is preparing a National Nature Restoration Plan, with some of the actions are already being implemented, “namely in the protection of the coastline and the renaturing of rivers”.
“It is increasingly important to be able to harmoniously combine the objectives of climate protection and nature protection with human activities,” she said.
Pimenta Machado, from the Portuguese Environment Agency and RiaViva, stressed that coastal erosion and “the amplitude of the tides” are challenges facing the new entity, which will also develop projects on new fronts, namely the renaturalisation of the rivers upstream of Ria de Aveiro and Pateira de Fermentelos, with an investment of around €86 million expected.
But what may have jarred for communities a little further north, in the boroughs of Boticas and Montalegre, is the way in which the secretary of state working for the same environment minister so keen to restore nature signed off on ‘an administrative easement’ designed purely to help a private company whose activity will ultimately destroy nature in what is both a Unesco World Agricultural Heritage site, and part of the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) .
Those communities, using every judicial means at their disposal, have stressed today that they know the victory won this week against the administrative easement is only temporary, but they will not give up, as their livelihoods and rural way of life depend on saving the landscape as it is.
“This is destruction,” one told Lusa, reporting from the municipality of Boticas, yesterday. “They (meaning the mining company) are destroying everything without pity or mercy for anyone and we have to try because we need this land, it was left to us by our ancestors, others bought it and we need it because we live from agriculture”.
And this is the reality: the government may be focused on “restoring nature” in some areas, but in others, it most definitely is not.
