A landmark agreement to safeguard one of Europe’s most important wetlands underscores the importance of harnessing public opinion to drive the green transition and help mitigate the effects of the climate emergency, the country’s environment minister has said.
The Doñana in western Andalucía – whose marshes, forests and dunes extend across almost 130,000 hectares (320,000 acres) and include a Unesco-listed national park – has been at the centre of a furious national and international row over recent years.
Water supplies to the park have declined drastically over the past three decades because of climate breakdown, mining pollution, marsh drainage – and the boom in soft fruit cultivation.
A deal reached in November by Spain’s environment minister, Teresa Ribera, for €1.4bn (£1.2bn) of investment to help protect the area and diversify the local economy away from its reliance on soft fruit however provided a ray of hope. It had been a year in which a plan from the Andalucían regional government for an amnesty for the farmers who have been illegally tapping its aquifer to irrigate strawberry farms in the area around the park had led to dire warnings from environmental groups, the European Union and supermarket chains.
Speaking to the Guardian, Ribera said the deal had been the result of internal and external pressure, a change in public opinion, and a concerted effort to engage with people in the region to explain the need for urgent action.
“There’s more of a future than strawberries and raspberries,” said Ribera. “And anyway, if you don’t look after the water, there will be no more strawberries or raspberries. I think that this change of mentality needs a very clear understanding.”
A report earlier this year from Spain’s national research council noted that 59% of Doñana’s large lakes had not been full since at least 2013, and that the area was in a “critical condition”. For the past two summers, Doñana’s largest permanent lake dried up completely and the park was recently removed from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s green list for failing to meet the necessary standards.
The proposed increase in irrigable land had also led a group of leading UK supermarkets – including Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Lidl, Aldi and Morrisons – to write to the Andalucían regional president warning him that the move risked damaging “the reputation and the long-term development of the region”.
Ribera said persuading people of the need to integrate environmental action into social and economic policy was essential to global efforts to deal with the climate emergency.
“It’s very important that we learn to combine strictly environmental measures with measures to reduce economic and social pressures in the area when it comes to green infrastructure and recovering natural spaces,” said Ribera. “You have to turn that relationship into a virtuous relationship in which the people there have alternatives that will allow them to be proud of where they live and not see those alternatives as a limitation or a threat.”
She said getting that message across was the “the great challenge for Europe in the very short term – and for the world as a whole”, adding that “decades-old perceptions” about the importance of integrated environmental policy were no longer valid.
“That’s very complicated and needs more than just engineering logic or economic projections,” she said. “It needs really important social participation and a cultural and emotional change when it comes to behaviours. If we don’t manage this change in collective psychology and social values properly, we’ll end up with gilets jaunes and with farmers in the Netherlands opposing soil protection rules. We’ll end up with complicated situations because people don’t know what it’ll mean to their lives in the very short term.”
The minister said the 2024 European elections would be decisive in keeping up the momentum and ensuring that hard-won environmental gains were not lost.
“This change for all of us is going to be so intense that none of us can miss the boat of the June elections,” she said. “It’s much harder to do this in a hostile environment.”
Ribera also took aim at political parties that engage in “very dangerous demagoguery” and attempt to dismiss the realities of the climate emergency for cynical, electoral gain.
“There are very anti-systemic forces that seek to break or question this agenda,” she said. “I think there’s some very hypocritical behaviour: I don’t believe this environmental or climate scepticism or denialism is because they doubt the analytic abilities of academics; I have absolutely no doubt that’s not the case … [But it] really worries me. We need to consolidate, explain and provide alternatives – and that can only be done with a very important social conviction and commitment.”
The minister also said politicians who failed to heed shifting public opinion on environmental matters would pay the price. She described Madrid city council’s decision to fell hundreds of trees in two popular parks to make way for an extension of the capital’s metro system as “an absolute disgrace”.
Although she has no powers to block the move as the decision was taken at a municipal and regional level, Ribera said she would be writing to regional ministers to propose a set of common directives to protect mature urban trees.
“Planting two six-month-old saplings isn’t the same as having trees that are 60 or 80 years old,” she said. “I can’t explain it: it’s like the anti-cycling lanes mania of some new mayors. It’s a scandal and I think it’ll have a far higher social and political cost than they thought – they’ll go through what Moreno Bonilla went through with Doñana.”
