I leaf through the pages of the Metropolitan Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change for the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon, a 2019 study, awarded internationally, and read yet another failure of the Portuguese State.
This plan identified, for those 18 municipalities, a large increase, in the coming years, in high temperatures, droughts, floods, floods and rising sea levels.
This plan also warns that, if nothing is done about the floods, several locations where hundreds of thousands of people currently live could simply disappear by 2071: for example, among others, the document identifies the area between Cova do Vapor and Costa da Caparica, the parishes next to the sea in Cascais or, in the Tagus estuary, huge parts of the municipality of Vila Franca de Xira.
This plan defined 13 strategic objectives and 73 adaptation measures, which include the relocation of buildings and infrastructure; the construction of dams and retention basins; the resizing of rainwater drainage systems; carrying out stabilization works on dangerous slopes; the implementation of autonomous drainage systems in large companies; the relocation, elevation of elevations or implementation of containment devices for energy production, transport and communications systems; the artificial nourishment of beaches; the construction of flood walls; the ban on new construction in dangerous areas; carrying out evacuation drills with the population; the installation of meteorological and hydrometric monitoring networks to be able to alert people in a timely manner, etc., etc.
This plan was therefore excellent. Has it been implemented?…
Certainly, some things were, but we all realize that the intensity and pace of application of measures of this type, highlighted in this and other similar studies carried out for other regions of the country, are distressingly insufficient.
The frequent storms, floods, “blackouts” and fires act as a test of stress to Portuguese society – and, unfortunately, we have been failed. On the one hand, we plan but do not execute; on the other, we privatize strategic infrastructures, such as energy distribution or telecommunications provision, which are weakened by the logic of profit, which takes away investment from resilience and disaster prevention and, in addition, reduces the capacity for command, coordination and response in emergency situations.
And even the Climate Basic Law, which is recent, from 2021, has poor application. Still, the Liberal Initiative, on the day the storm Kristin left a trail of devastation and death, the Legislative Assembly had scheduled the debate on a project to modify and weaken the limitations imposed by this law. The idea is to “help the economy”, in a logic in which profit takes precedence over the defense of life and the common good.
Almost every year we count those killed by fires and the last two weeks of storms have shown, once again, with the direct or indirect cost of at least 15 deaths, thousands of people displaced and the destruction of millions and millions of euros worth of property, the fragility of the country’s defenses in the face of environmental attacks – and how we do not seriously invest in combating and preventing them. But, it seems, we are going to spend 5% of our GDP to defend ourselves against an unlikely Russian attack…
Oh! There is one thing we are good at: we fire a minister every now and then, to calm the population.
Journalist
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