The lack of rain due to climate change, the non-fulfillment of previously planned hydraulic works and insufficient investments have turned the Barcelona region into an area vulnerable to droughts, cyclically condemned to be one step away from domestic restrictions. One of Spain's economic engines therefore has its feet in mud because the accumulation of unheeded alerts has put it at risk of not being able to guarantee a basic supply as needed without mortgaging its future prosperity.
The Government sees it as inevitable that the regions of Barcelona and Girona enter an emergency, which opens the door to restrictions in the domestic sphere, a declaration that will happen when the Ter and Llobregat reservoirs drop to 16%, and now their level covers 16.9%.
All this is evidence that the previous droughts did not serve to leave with the lesson well learned. In the drought of 1990, Barcelona already received a serious warning and was only a few weeks away from implementing domestic restrictions; the same thing happened in the episode of 2007-2008, when the rains in May avoided the worst; and now, once again, after 36 months with practically no precipitation, all the alarms have gone off in the worst drought in history in Catalonia. Agricultural, livestock and industrial sectors are the first to suffer service cuts.
The conclusion is clear. Barcelona cannot rely on the natural resources of climatology (rainwater) as the main guarantee of supply based on river and well flows. Droughts have served these years as a lever to propose a supply that is less dependent on the natural cycle of rain. For this reason, desalination and a more important use of purified wastewater (to be regenerated and reused) appear as the alternative on which future solutions will pivot.
But this transition is being traumatic due to the repeated exercise of forgetting. After the rains of May 2008, which put an end to the drought, the plans to not repeat mistakes were left in the fire of shavings. Thus, the two new desalination plants promised by the Government for the period 2009-2015 (Blanes and Cunit-Foix) were not built; and even "fell out" of the planning for the 2016-2021 cycle. Only recently, already with water around its neck, has Blanes entered the new program (2022-2027).
After the construction of the Prat desalination plant (with 85% funding from the EU), these necessary investments were left in the ditch, postponed in the decade of the investment drought, a time of full reservoirs, marked by the 'obsession with not increasing the debt of the Catalan Water Agency, even though austerity later ended up being too dangerous. In Catalonia, the principle that users must pay for hydraulic works (on receipt of water) has been taken to the extreme, which has allowed public budgets to escape scrutiny while state solidarity has evaporated ( now just recovered).
Meanwhile, water management rarely appears on the political agenda, and only emerges when the level of reservoirs drops so low that it forces administrations to sound the tam-tam of domestic restrictions. But the alerts were previously launched due to the observed decline in the river courses, exacerbated by an expansion of the forest that absorbs water without a brake.
But not even the situations of maximum alert have served as a shock to achieve the pact and provide security and stability to the supply. And it has been in the most acute phases of the water crisis that Catalonia has looked in the mirror of a divided country.
Four professional associations in Catalonia (Industrial Engineers, Road Engineers, Agronomists and Economists) have again raised the proposal to interconnect the Tarragona Water Consortium's supply network with that of Ter-Llobregat, as the work of emergency taking advantage of the flows that Camp de Tarragona does not take advantage of. The proposal is not new. Faced with the severity of the drought in 2008, the central government agreed to authorize an extension of the mini-transfer of the Ebro towards Barcelona (and went on to award the work). But with the rains of May that year, the project was forgotten. His supporters now remember that if this work had been carried out, the Barcelona region would already have a "faucet" available that would alleviate the drought.
But the interconnection of the Ebro and Ter-Llobregat networks has been ruled out by the secretary of Climate Action, Anna Barnadas, who has questioned whether the Ebro basin is surplus (with the Mequinesa reservoir at a 80%) and has replied that "a fixed structure" could lead to a continuous transfer of water from the Ebro to Barcelona. “ We reject interconnection; the priority must be to recover and take advantage of the Besòs water", says Susana Abella, from the Plataforma de Defensa de l'Ebre.
The management
of the water
