The Santa Olalla lagoon, in the Doñana natural park, in southern Spain, has completely dried up for the second consecutive year due to the effect of climate change and intensive agriculture and tourism, according to researchers and environmental associations.
The lagoon, which was previously the only one that remained flooded even during the hottest boreal summers in that area, appears these days as an immense patch of cracked earth that replaced the waters that previously harbored great aquatic life and attracted huge colonies of birds. migration to the natural park nestled in the area of Andalusia that is a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Santa Olalla became a symbol of the growing scarcity of water in the country, 75% of whose territory is subjected to a climate that could lead to desertification.
“Recent years have been very dry, which is not uncommon in a Mediterranean climate,” Carmen Díaz Paniagua, a researcher at the Doñana biological station, told the AFP news agency.
The lagoon, which at its highest levels can cover 45 hectares, has not stopped shrinking in recent years, but never before has it been seen to dry up completely two summers in a row.
Díaz Paniagua was especially concerned about the “overexploitation” of the water table under the park, “both for irrigation of the surrounding fields and for a tourist development.”
Adjacent to the park is a beach that attracts large crowds in the summer. “What we cannot think is that this is only a natural thing, that it occurs due to climate change and that we cannot remedy it,” he added about the effects of agriculture and intensive tourism.
Environmental associations denounced the impact of agricultural policies in recent years in Spain, which were also criticized by authorities of the European Union.
For its part, Unesco warned that the recent irrigation bill presented by the Andalusian government, chaired by the conservative Popular Party, could cause the park to lose its place on the organization’s world heritage list.
The bill, presented in the regional Parliament, aims to regularize hundreds of hectares of illegal berry crops on the park’s borders.
In 2014, the region, then governed by the Socialists, regularized 9,000 hectares to bring order to strawberry cultivation, after years of anarchic expansion, but the PP denounced that “hundreds of farmers” had been left “out in the open.”
The question of Doñana even occupied a prominent place at the national level during the campaign in the last municipal and regional elections in May, and in the legislative elections in July, in this country where 80% of freshwater resources are consumed by farmers .
“The water management policy is really not favorable to the conservation of the Doñana lagoons,” Díaz Paniagua concluded.
Source: Ambito
