The Doñana national park is home to
wild horses and flamingos as well as Iberian lynx. Photograph: Rupert
Sagar-Musgrave/Alamy Stock Photo
The Guardian
Arthur
Neslen
Thursday
15 September 2016
Doñana wetlands in Andalusia is home to
thousands of species but has lost most of its natural water due to industry and
faces ‘danger’ listing by Unesco
A
Spanish wetland home to 2,000 species of wildlife – including around 6 million
migratory birds – is on track to join a Unesco world heritage danger list,
according to a new report.
Doñana
is an Andalusian reserve of sand dunes, shallow streams and lagoons, stretching
for 540 square kilometres (209 square miles) where flamingoes feed and wild
horses and Iberian lynx still roam.
But
the Doñana region is said to have lost 80% of its natural water supplies due to
marsh drainage, intensive agriculture, and water pollution from the mining
industry.
Spain
now has until 1 December to declare Doñana permanently off limits for dredging
and industrial activity in a report to Unesco, or face becoming the first EU
country to have a national park classified as being “in danger”.
Eva
Hernández, a spokeswoman for WWF, which is launching a campaign to save Doñana
on Wednesday, said that the park’s situation had become critical.
“Doñana’s
biodiversity has eroded over the last 40 years and we are reaching a point of
no return,” she said. “We could do things to recover the park – and some things
are being done – but the pressures on it from private and public companies are
becoming unbearable. We must decide whether it is more important to consume all
of Doñana’s resources or to preserve its biodiversity and services to the
people.”
According
to WWF’s new report, more than 1,000 illegal wells drilled by farmers are
accelerating the park’s destruction, as drought-resistant plants replace
water-dependent ones in the region.
Industrial
activity exacerbates this picture. A recent Unesco decision viewed with “utmost
concern” plans to allow the México-Minorbis group to reopen a mine in
Aznalcóllar, the scene of one of Spain’s worst ecological disasters in 1998.
Mechtild
Rössler, the director of Unesco’s world heritage centre, and a veteran of the
clean-up operation following that disaster, said that reopening the mine would
be “not at all” compatible with world heritage site status, in her view.
“We
also made it very clear that any plans for the approval of gas and oil
exploration in or around the park would not be acceptable to us,” she said.
Spain
has declared the area under Doñana a “strategic gas storage site” and
authorised exploration and storage work by Gas Natural Fenosa within the park’s
vicinity.
Most
troubling for conservationists is a plan by the port authority of Seville to
dredge the local Guadalquivir river to allow access for cargo and cruise ships
in 2018.
A
Unesco report last year said: “If [Spain] fails to urgently make a permanent
and unequivocal commitment to abandon the plan to deepen the Guadalquivir river
... it should lead to the inscription of this property on the List of World
Heritage Sites in Danger.”
A
Spanish supreme court ruling forced a temporary halt to the project last year
but it was put back on the agenda by a government decree in January.
Much
will hinge on the exact wording of Spain’s letter to Unesco, but “if the report
says that they are going ahead with dredging, I will repeat that the
committee’s opinion was very clear, so there’s a very real risk of a ‘danger’
listing,” Rössler said.
The
European commission has also launched an infringement case against Spain, which
could end up in the European court.
A
Spanish government spokesman did not respond to questions about the dredging or
gas projects, but said: “We support all initiatives to promote the conservation
of a natural area so unique and of such high ecological value as Doñana. Spain
is doing everything in its power to end the over-exploitation of the Doñana
aquifers and solve the regional problem of water scarcity.”
Doñana
receives a liquid lifeline from the Guadalquivir and Guadiamar rivers, and from
a large underground aquifer. But these resources have dwindled at the expense
of river modifications and intensive irrigation schemes.
The
Doñana basin contains Europe’s most productive rice field as well as being a
fruit basket for Spain’s export to other EU countries. Some 70% of Spain’s
strawberries are produced in the region, raising €400m a year - compared to the
€74m a year that beach, nature and cultural tourism brings in.
But
licenced farms are disadvantaged in their competition with hundreds of illegal
operations that siphon off water from the park across 3,000 hectares of fields….
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