Multiple organisations and movements seek ‘genuine ecological flow regime’
Environmental organisation ‘Movimento proTEJO’ went to the Ministry of the Environment in Lisbon today to demand that the Iberian agreement on cross-border water management to be signed with Spain be publicised.
However, it was told that it was “not yet definitive”.
Speaking to Lusa, Ana Silva, the movement’s spokesperson, explained that representatives who travelled to Lisbon were met by an assistant to the minister for the environment and energy, Maria da Graça Carvalho, and were told that the agreement “wasn’t being signed today, but would be on the 27th (Friday)“.
“We didn’t have access to the document. We were also told that a technical team from Portugal was going to work on the agreement tomorrow and that it would only be publicised once it had been signed”, said Silva.
The ministry spokeswoman added that the document “won’t be final” until it has gone through other bodies, such as the commission that manages the application of the Albufeira Convention (the agreement that regulates the management of rivers shared by Portugal and Spain), “to be analysed”.
ProTejo, along with 37 other organisations and civic movements, has asked, in an Open Letter, for the terms of the agreement “but no one has ever replied”. Two meetings with the environment minister have also been requested.
As proTEJO reiterates, the Tejo “urgently needs a true ecological flow regime determined by scientific methods, which contribute to the good ecological status of river ecosystems”.
In the movement’s view, minimum daily flows announced this summer by the government are unnecessary, as they would be in addition to the weekly, quarterly and annual minimum flows set politically and administratively in the Albufeira Convention, which “are not even ecological”.
Says the movement: “It must be made clear that a true ecological flow regime is not in line with the proposal for minimum daily flows” (put forward by the last government) which basically allowed for the division of the current 7 hm3 [cubic hectometres] of minimum weekly flow “to be released at whatever time the Spanish hydroelectric concession company (Iberdrola) wishes”.
According to proTEJO, the concept “repeats the absurd formula agreed in 2017 between the Socialist government and EDP, which set a minimum daily flow in the Belver dam” that allowed ‘zero flows to be maintained for 16 hours a day‘.
The current situation “requires an unequivocal demonstration of responsibility from both parties and, for this reason, it was demanded that prior information on the content of the agreement be made public, in order to ensure that the Portuguese State, through the Minister for the Environment and Energy, does not repeat the use of hasty solutions of a markedly economistic nature of minimum daily flows.
“It is also imperative that we don’t waste this window of opportunity by demanding the implementation of a true ecological flow regime, making it conditional on Iberdrola being authorised to build the two reversible pumping hydroelectric projects at the Alcântara and Valdecañas dams on the river, which, according to media reports, are to be negotiated in exchange for Portugal’s abstraction of water from Pomarão”, the environmentalists warn.
Thirty-one organisations from Portugal, Spain and the rest of Europe have lodged a complaint with the European Commission about “non-compliance with the Water Framework Directive due to the non-implementation of an ecological flow regime by Spain and Portugal”.
The defence of the implementation of an ecological flow regime, recalls proTEJO, was also accompanied by the intermunicipal communities of Médio Tejo, Lezíria do Tejo and Beira Baixa – but blanked by the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, and its various municipalities.
Source: LUSA
