The drought is taking its toll on Doñana. The park is going through its most critical moment and while biodiversity decreases on the surface, its underground reserves are in free fall due to intensive agriculture and tourism, as clarified the latest government report known this Wednesday and that reflects the very low levels of its aquifer. Doñana has not recorded a wet year for 13 years, since the winter of 2010, and all hydrological years have been normal, dry or very dry. Since 1970, the reserve has seen three droughts, but this is the worst and longest. Last year, classified as “dry”, only 323 liters per square meter fell, when the historical average is 523. As if that were not enough, the average temperature in the park was two degrees higher than the average, reaching 19 degrees.
The first consequence is that its wetlands, the most emblematic ecosystem of the reserve, disappear quickly and progressively. Last year, only four of its nine main fresh lagoons had water and if the trend is not reversed, migratory birds will soon pass by. The enormous aquifer, measuring 2,409 square kilometers and declared overexploited in 2020, swallows almost everything that falls from the sky because underground it is stung and increasingly empty.
Of the 16 sectors that make up the underground reserve, none are in a normal situation: three remain on pre-alert, three on alert and 10 on alarm. That is, most of the aquifer surface is in its worst possible state. And there is a disturbing fact: there is an increasing concentration of nitrates due to intensive agriculture, based on the cultivation of strawberries.
Of the five bodies of water in Doñana, three do not reach good quantitative status and that of Almonte is classified “in poor chemical status” by experts who analyze water quality through 59 surveys, according to the preliminary report for the 2022 hydrological year. -2023 of the Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation, dependent on the Ministry for the Ecological Transition. “It is urgent that the competent authority take measures to maintain nitrate levels within those set by regulations,” warn the technicians who analyze the subsoil of the reserve.
“The scenario is unknown until now, there has never been such a long period without wet years, we have already had 12. To this we must add the increase of more than two degrees in temperature and the trend is that there are no longer cool years. The analysis of the aquifer is devastating and no sector has recovered, and one has even worsened. We draw more water than it rains. We are drinking up the reserves and spending the savings, the aquifer has collapsed,” warns Juan José Carmona, head of WWF for Doñana.
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Two weeks ago the Government and the Board announced a social plan with 350 million to try to get farmers with illegal irrigation to abandon their greenhouses in exchange for 100,000 euros per hectare, and a year ago the Ministry advanced another hydraulic infrastructure plan with 356 million to bring the reserve out of its ecological coma.
Are the measures late? The aquifer was declared overexploited in the summer of 2020 and by law the following year the Government had to establish an extraction plan to prevent water from being extracted in excess of what is recharged. Almost four years later, the extraction plan still does not exist and the Hydrographic Confederation justifies the enormous delay because the creation of user communities with water rights holders must first be completed, although it is not mandatory.
“After declaring the aquifer overexploited, which is the limit and desperation regulations, the Government had to act urgently. Is it the politicians' fault for not allocating more funds or for the spiral of conflict initiated by the Board? The truth is that we are still continuing with the extraction plan and the work of Matalascañas [para alejar los sondeos de los humedales] “It's still not over,” Carmona censures.
For WWF, salinization is another serious problem for the park identified by the scientists who study the reserve, which it describes as very serious: “It is like pouring cement into a reservoir and then wanting to recover it and having to remove that cement with a pick and shovel, it would take years. Since we do not see it, we are not aware of the damage it causes, because the plants that cannot adapt to this salinization will die.”
Ecologistas en Acción has called the result of the report a “chronicle foretold” and “slow and progressive agony.” “Reversing the current situation is going to be very costly and very difficult, we are going to destroy the largest water infrastructure that Doñana has, it is going to be useless or unusable and that will have very dramatic consequences for biodiversity,” stressed its spokesperson in Huelva. , Juan Romero.
Since 2015, legal extractions of red fruit crops – the recognized ones, not the illegal ones, which are around 795 hectares – have decreased by 10 cubic hectometers thanks to the purchase of the Los Mimbrales farm by the Government in 2015 and 3.7 cubic hectometers after replacement by surface waters in the Arroyo de Don Gil area. And despite this reduction, the pressure from legal and illegal farmers and tourism in Matalascañas, just 50 meters from the beginning of the park, causes the park's reserves to continue downhill and without brakes.
“The current degree and mode of exploitation of the underground resources of the aquifer compromises its good condition and that of the terrestrial ecosystems that depend on it, which is evident in the fact that three of the five underground water masses that make up the system do not reach the good quantitative condition,” warn the Confederation technicians, who propose the horizon of 2027 to ensure that the park recovers its levels of ecological wealth of yesteryear.
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