In the last year, Catalonia has suffered a serious lack of rain, which has emptied the reservoirs of the internal basins. The lack of available water will soon cause the Generalitat to declare a state of emergency in the Barcelona area and in the entire Ter-Llobregat supply system, and activate The restrictions corresponding. Only the months of May and June provided relief in the form of rainfall, but it was completely insufficient.
Drought is a problem with its own specificities. The abundance or scarcity of rain does not depend on the administrations, which cannot predict exactly when a period of drought will occur. If this was already the case before, Climate change has only aggravated the issue. Climate change, despite being a global circumstance, manifests itself differently in each geographic region. Right now we are seeing how, for example, while Catalonia suffers a desperate shortage of water, other areas of the Peninsula do not have this problem. The savings, together with the supply of regenerated and desalinated water, have made it possible to avoid the restrictions that will accompany the emergency until today.
Entry into the emergency phase will mean the imposition of savings measures that will affect the majority of the Catalan population. Among them, drops in tap pressure, limitations on irrigation and pool filling, or the drastic reduction of the environmental flows of rivers (the water that guarantees the maintenance of the ecosystem).
Since it has been announced for a long time that we could reach the current situation, and since Catalonia had suffered other serious episodes of drought in the past, it is entirely appropriate, as EL PERIÓDICO has done, to ask what the Generalitat has done. and the Catalan town councils to navigate the situation we face as best as possible. If we review the actions of each of them, we come to the conclusion that, although numerous initiatives have been taken, sometimes even in anticipation, other times they have failed, as the opposition to the Generalitat government points out, in procrastination and lack of action, possibly trusting that the very low rainfall was not going to be as persistent as it has actually turned out to be.
The measures that should have been taken and have not yet been taken, or are delayed, have to do above all with investments and infrastructure. Thus, the delay in getting aid to the municipalities to repairing leaks and maintaining your water pipes. The same occurs with the commissioning of more regeneration and desalination plants.
The lack or slowness in investments is not the exclusive responsibility of the current Government or city councils, but also of previous ones. Politics in democracy usually suffers from this defect. Political leaders focus on the short term, while they tend to relegate the prevention of problems that may arise in the medium and long term. It is to be hoped, however, that, this time, the severity of the present situation will trigger the definitive push for all those measures necessary to face the droughts of the future in better conditions.