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Date Published: 14/06/2022

ARCHIVED - Ecologists in Action award black flags to the Mar Menor and Portman Bay

ARCHIVED ARTICLE

The flags highlight beaches and coastal areas in Spain that are failing in their environmental efforts

<span style='color:#780948'>ARCHIVED</span> - Ecologists in Action award black flags to the Mar Menor and Portman Bay

The Mar Menor and the Sierra Minera-Bahía de Portmán are once again the areas in the Region of Murcia to receive the ‘black flags’ of the environmental group Ecologists in Action (Ecologistas en Acción), who award these ironic distinctions as a form of protest against environmental mismanagement and pollution in these areas.

At the same time as Blue Flags are being handed out to recognise good work on quality beaches in Spain, Ecologists in Action are demanding more be done to help the country’s polluted marine areas, such as the Mar Menor and Portmán Bay.

The Mar Menor

In a report presented this Tuesday, the environmental organisation has pointed out that, in the case of the Mar Menor, although “some improvements” are being observed as a result of “social pressure”, there is still “much to be done”, which is why it continues to receive a black flag.

For Ecologists in Action, poor land management and the lack of regulation of economic sectors, especially agro-industry and intensive livestock farming, are pushing the ecosystem to the “limit of its capacity for resistance”.

See also: Murcia court rules against authorising accidental discharges into Mar Menor

The report on the state of the environment states that the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) recognised in 2021 that the lagoon ecosystem had “lost its capacity for self-regulation”, so that any impact, such as excessive nutrient inputs, has serious consequences.

However, in the same document, the IEO stated that it is still possible to recover a large part of the Mar Menor, as long as effective solutions are adopted immediately.

For the moment, although there have been some “hopeful” movements, according to Ecologistas en Acción, the reality is that “almost everything remains to be done” in terms of reducing pollution at source and in terms of measures to prevent it from advancing towards the Mar Menor.

It has warned that the threat of a new ‘green soup’ and animal mortality due to anoxia this year is recognised by all the administrations and scientific experts, while warning of the economic and social consequences of the degradation, which are already beginning to be quantified in “millions of dollars in losses”, both in the real estate sector and in the tourism and fishing sectors.

Portmán Bay

In the case of Portmán Bay and the Sierra Minera, Ecologists in Action has indicated that they are the reflection of an “absolute” institutional and social failure.

After decades of allowing the environment to be polluted by destructive mining activity, the Sierra Minera is now a “scorched earth”, where a private company has made a profit from the exploitation of natural resources.

These profits, according to Ecologistas en Acción, were obtained by destroying the landscape and generating tons of toxic waste that accumulated in ponds without adequate insulation and sealing, and which almost completely clogged the bay, leaving the local populations with a “very dismal future: without landscape and with an enormous debt in the form of toxic waste”.

Read more: Understanding the ecological disaster of Portmán Bay

The organisation’s report reflects that, after the end of mining activity in the 1990s, the administration allowed the company to leave at virtually no cost, and the current owners have not been obliged to prevent the spread of contamination from the waste piles.

Since then, more than two decades have passed in which there have been constant demands for a solution, a future for the affected populations, which, despite some progress, has yet to happen.

Furthermore, Ecologists in Action has warned about the effects on the health of local populations, who display “unacceptable levels” of heavy metals due to this exposure, and watch in despair as public administrations “minimise the problem” and wait “forever” to implement promised solutions, which “never seem to arrive”.

These two cases, the report concluded, are still the “most serious” cases of mismanagement and pollution of the coastal environment, but it stressed that in the rest of the coast of the Region of Murcia there are “many other undesirable impacts and situations, which also deserve to be denounced and effective solutions demanded”.

In Spain, of the 48 black flags in the 2022 report, 14 were awarded for “dumping, deficiencies in sanitation systems and serious purification problems” and a further 10 for “coastal development encroaching on the maritime-terrestrial public domain”, the two most frequent causes this year.

Other causes for the awarding of black flags this year were “effects on biodiversity” (5 black flags), “dredging and extensions” (4), “development of coastal industrial areas” (4), coastal erosion (3), accumulation of marine litter (3) and others such as “aquaculture” and “chemical pollution” (4).

Image 1: CARM

Image 2: Ayuntamiento de La Unión