The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment has promoted public participation in the development of the Climate Change Strategy on the Spanish Coast, with the celebration today of a specific debate day at the headquarters of the Ministry, which has been inaugurated by the Director General for the Sustainability of the Coast and the Sea, Pablo Saavedra, and closed by the Director General of the Spanish Office for Climate Change, Susana Magro.
This debate forum, organised by the two aforementioned departments of the Ministry, was attended by experts, researchers, ecologists and representatives of the Administration.
The conclusions resulting from this discussion forum will be used to guide the development of the aforementioned Strategy, provided for in the Law on the Protection and Sustainable Use of the Coastline and Modification of the Coastal Law, approved in 2013.
In the presentation of this Conference, Saavedra stressed that “climate change adaptation policies must integrate the opinions and participation of the academic, scientific and environmental world”. For this reason, the Ministry wants to develop a Climate Change Adaptation Strategy on the Spanish Coast in which it has a stake, which will give continuity to the work it is carrying out so that it can be used in the coming years.
Pablo Saavedra, in his speech, recalled that our 10,000 km of coastline are especially vulnerable to climate change, so appropriate protection measures must be adopted, maintaining the balance between their natural and heritage values, and even more so taking into account their great wealth in biodiversity and that 80% of tourism industries are related to our beaches.
The Coastal Law approved in 2013, as well as its Regulations, take into account climate change adaptation projects when granting or extinguishing concessions in the maritime-terrestrial public domain, Saavedra stressed.
INTEGRATION OF PREVENTIVE ACTIONS AND MEASURES
Susana Magro, at the closing of the Conference, stressed that “future climate scenarios foresee a progressive warming of the water and the rise of the sea, so progress must be made in the integration of measures to anticipate these effects”. In this regard, he commented that his department has carried out a study on how climate projections at the end of the 21st century may affect our coastline, a study that “has been carried out with the best available knowledge of the Spanish coast, -including data relating to population, ecosystems and economic aspects- and that allows us to lay a solid foundation to implement the necessary preventive actions to increase the adaptation capacity of our coasts”.
