The first meeting of the Terres de l'Ebre Water Board has put around twenty socio-economic entities in the territory to work to make a diagnosis of water management and raise these "specificities" to the National Water Board.
Faced with a climate emergency context in which a drought like the current one will be recurrent and habitual, the territory demands that Ebrense's "diversity" and characteristics be taken into account in the country's water policies.
In fact, the Ebro Water Table will propose measures to reduce consumption by 25%. On the other hand, work will be done with the Ebro Hydrographic Confederation (CHE) to "harmonize" the management of the drought alert with that of the Catalan Water Agency (ACA).
Nineteen ebrenca, union, environmental and social entities met this Monday with the Government delegation in the Terres de l'Ebre, headed by the territorial director of Climate Action, Jesús Gómez.
The meeting has launched the water table, which is open to greater sectoral and social participation. After the first contact, they will hold two meetings. The second, in the first quarter of next year, they will share the diagnosis and proposals of each entity, and in the third, in the second quarter of 2024, they will validate their conclusions.
The aim is for the national water table to take into account the diagnosis made by the Ebro territory when applying regulatory changes, new approaches and actions - including budgets -. "The Terres de l'Ebre must provide their own characteristics," claimed Gómez.
The Ebrense director of Climate Action recalled that the hydrological basins are divided in Catalonia between the Ebro basin and the internal ones and that the "differences" in administrative functioning between the CHE and the ACA must also be minimized.
There are Ebrense municipalities on both sides and they are governed by different guidelines and different levels of alerts, more restrictive and with a more long-term vision in the case of the ACA.
"Citizens do not understand that in one place they can fill the pool and ten kilometers away, no," said Jesús Gómez. Another example of the planning differences that the territorial director has put in place is the situation suffered by the rice sector. The campaign began with the expectation that there would be no restrictions and was reduced by half days before starting to sow.
Even so, Gómez has stressed that the country has adapted "better" than during the 2008 drought, but that a future scenario must be prepared where it is already known that there will be lower water regimes.
