SDG 13 | climate action
Human action and climate change dry up Spanish wetlands despite being environmentally protected
In 1914, the Doñana marshes were “smiling, girded with gold with the sun in their broken mirrors”, as the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez described them. Years before, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez novelized his Valencian Albufera as “a street in Venice, with the banks covered with barracks and nurseries.” One hundred years later, that landscape is difficult to see and “it will not come back,” says Roberto González, head of the Water program at SEO/BirdLife.
Seeing Doñana through the eyes of the Generation of 27 is now only possible through literature, because in recent decades “more than 60% of wetlands in Spain have been destroyed,” warns Amanda del Río, technical director of Global Nature Foundation.
To speak of wetlands in Spain is to speak of Doñana, the Tablas de Daimiel, the Valencian Albufera or the Mar Menor or also to speak of “the greenery of an immense delta (…) in which the fresh water and the sea merged bitter”, written by Gerard Vergés while looking at the Ebro Delta.
These are the best known of the 734 registered in the Spanish Inventory of Wetlands of the Ministry for Ecological Transition. In fact, Spain is the third country with the most wetlands included in the Ramsar Convention (75), an intergovernmental environmental treaty established in 1971 by UNESCO, which entered into force in 1975 and seeks the protection and care of these natural areas.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, 64% of wetlands worldwide have disappeared
Wetlands make up the most fragile ecosystem in the world, several scientific studies reveal that 64% have disappeared from the planet since 1900, while the percentage rises to 87% if the loss is calculated from 1700. «Research indicates that the Ebro Delta It will be the first place in Spain that will bring the appearance of climate refugees in our country and I am not talking about birds, but about people”, warns González. “That is not the fault of climate change, but that we are responsible,” he adds.
Along with the mouth of the Ebro, Doñana, the Mar Menor or Las Tablas de Daimiel are the national aquatic ecosystems in “serious danger”, says del Río. A series of patients in intensive care, but who have a long way to go to reach the ‘plant’.
“I think we are on time, we are in the decade of restoration,” he adds. Less optimistic is González, “the modification of these large ecosystems has been brutal.” Last 2021 closed the first year of the Decade for Restoration, named after the United Nations, and the balance is discouraging “few changes and improvements”, the environmental organizations respond in unison. “Nature takes its times and processes”, reassures del Río.
bleak future
With a wetland heritage of 2,000 wetlands, Spain is working on the recovery of 20,000 hectares of these aquatic ecosystems by 2030, but the forecast is not the same for the NGO WWF. “The availability of fresh water is expected to decrease by 15% over the next 20 years due to climate change,” they state in their reports. “But the basic problem is the model of agricultural production that we have set up,” adds the person in charge of the Water program at SEO/BirdLife.
“Freshwater availability is expected to decrease by 15% over the next 20 years due to climate change”
In June 2021, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) condemned Spain “for not protecting Doñana”, recalls WWF. The sentence was clear with the reason for the sanction: «excessive extraction of groundwater». “No one thinks of doing graffiti on Burgos Cathedral or removing stones from the pillars, because they fall,” González compares, “because that’s what we are doing in Doñana and both are World Heritage Sites,” he adds.
But the threat is not only Doñana, the excessive extraction of water and the lack of precipitation in Las Tablas de Daimiel have dried up its lagoons. But, “it is not the only problem,” says del Río.
“There are more and more chemicals and pollutants in the water,” he details. This is the case of the Mar Menor, threatened by the toxic discharges of its fertilizers that break the balance of its waters and the seabed.
“We have generated a very large impact in a short time,” denounces Amanda del Río. Wetlands are a fundamental part of life on Earth, “they are its kidneys and they are in critical condition,” he warns. “They filter the water and capture the CO2, if you destroy them you emit more,” he warns.
Wetlands are the most efficient carbon sinks on Earth. The peat that is born in the depths of these aquatic ecosystems “stores approximately 30% of all terrestrial carbon, twice the amount that all the forests of the world combined”, indicates the Ramsar Convention. “We have to take a broader view of what is happening in the wetlands and explain it well, because people don’t know what is happening and there is no turning back,” says González.