Every drop counts

A very dry 2021

Last year was very dry and warm all over Cat­alo­nia. Some ob­ser­va­to­ries, such as the Fabra Ob­ser­va­tory in Barcelona, reg­is­tered it as one of the dri­est in a cen­tury. How­ever, we did not suf­fer a water short­age be­cause the reser­voirs were well stocked from the rain­fall in 2020, which was wet from the start due to Storm Glo­ria. This is one of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Mediter­ranean cli­mate: re­cur­ring episodes of al­ter­nat­ing rain and drought. In ad­di­tion, ge­o­graph­i­cal di­ver­sity means that tem­per­a­tures are very dif­fer­ent in one place to an­other in the same re­gion. An ex­am­ple: on Sun­day March 6, the av­er­age tem­per­a­ture in Barcelona’s port was 10.5 °C, while in Boí it was -8.6 °C. The same is true with rain: to give Storm Glo­ria as an­other ex­am­ple. On Jan­u­ary 22, 2020, 100 mm of water fell per month in Falset (Pri­o­rat), while in Mont-roig del Camp (Baix Camp) the fig­ure was only 8 mm (the two towns are sep­a­rated by a dis­tance of about 30 kilo­me­tres).

More heat

The ir­reg­u­lar Mediter­ranean cli­mate is noth­ing new. Yet all the pre­dicted sce­nar­ios in the cli­mate emer­gency in­di­cate that ther­mome­ters will rise sig­nif­i­cantly in the com­ing decades – by as much as 2 °C - due to global warm­ing. As for rain, it is not clear what might hap­pen in Cat­alo­nia, due to its in­trin­sic vari­abil­ity, but there are in­di­ca­tions that there will prob­a­bly be more storms, leav­ing longer pe­ri­ods of drought in be­tween.

As men­tioned, 2021 was very dry and al­though win­ter promised rain at the be­gin­ning – there was heavy pre­cip­i­ta­tion in the Pyre­nees – it turned out to be dis­as­trous: in most of the Cata­lan coun­ties it rained less than 30% of the av­er­age in Jan­u­ary.

“We hadn’t had much rain since the end of 2020, in fact. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, dur­ing that pe­riod it had rained only 50% of what would be con­sid­ered the norm. And if we think about the last few months, I would de­scribe the sit­u­a­tion as dis­as­trous in 90% of the re­gion,” said David Muñoz, a mem­ber of the Adenc en­vi­ron­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tion and am­a­teur me­te­o­rol­o­gist. A lack of rain ac­com­pa­nied by strong sun­shine had caused a very se­vere sur­face drought.

“In Sant Llorenç del Munt i l’Obac nat­ural park, for ex­am­ple, I’ve seen very dry oak trees, and I at­tribute this di­rectly to the drought of re­cent months,” added Muñoz, who like many peo­ple is con­cerned about what might hap­pen this spring. “Two things may have hap­pened by June: ei­ther it will have rained and we no longer worry about it, or it won’t rain enough and we will con­tinue to hear news about the drought. Let’s hope we have a cou­ple of good down­pours and it’s the for­mer,” he says.

In sum, the prob­lem is that while we have en­joyed the good weather of such a mild win­ter with many hours of sun­shine, the con­tin­ued lack of rain­fall has grad­u­ally led to a lack of flow in the rivers and has there­fore also de­creased the re­fill­ing of aquifers reser­voirs. The rains of re­cent days have only served to slightly im­prove the sit­u­a­tion. Ac­cord­ing to Cata­lan gov­ern­ment data, water re­serves in the Ter - the Llo­bre­gat sys­tem, which is the most im­por­tant since it serves most of the Cata­lan pop­u­la­tion - are at 54%. “It’s a sit­u­a­tion or sce­nario that we refer to as pre-alert, where it’s not yet nec­es­sary to take re­stric­tive mea­sures, but pre­ven­tive ones are needed to stop the sit­u­a­tion from get­ting worse. This would in­clude, for ex­am­ple, very care­ful man­age­ment of re­serves and con­trol of de­mand, es­pe­cially for large-scale con­sumers, and ac­ti­vat­ing de­sali­nated water pro­duc­tion,” ac­cord­ing to sources from the De­part­ment of Cli­mate Ac­tion. At the mo­ment, the de­sali­na­tion plants are op­er­at­ing at 85% of their total ca­pac­ity, when in a nor­mal sit­u­a­tion they would be at 10-15%. Cat­alo­nia has two de­sali­na­tion plants, the one in Blanes, at the mouth of the Tordera river, which was opened in 2002, and the one in El Prat, at the mouth of the Llo­bre­gat river, which was opened in the sum­mer of 2009 after the his­tor­i­cal drought that marked a turn­ing point for the coun­try. At the time, the cli­mate emer­gency was not yet fully ac­cepted, but it made more peo­ple aware that water is a scarce com­mod­ity.

The 2008 drought

To get an idea of what this meant to Cat­alo­nia, we need only cite a few rel­e­vant facts: fif­teen con­sec­u­tive months with­out rain­fall at the head­wa­ters of rivers, both in the in­land basins of Cat­alo­nia and in the Cata­lan basins of the Ebre river; water re­serves in the Ter and Llo­bre­gat reser­voirs falling to 20% of their ca­pac­ity; the main Cata­lan aquifers hit­ting his­toric lows, and more than 4,400 news items pub­lished about the drought dur­ing the months of April and May 2008.

It will also be re­mem­bered for the then en­vi­ron­ment sec­re­tary, Francesc Bal­tasar, an­nounc­ing that he had asked La Moreneta – the Vir­gin Mary statue in Montser­rat monastery - to make it rain, de­spite de­clar­ing him­self an ag­nos­tic. The prayer was held at the monastery in March dur­ing a fu­neral, he ex­plained to the press in April, and in May the ex­pected rains oc­curred, just as ships of the Tar­rag­ona water com­pany EMATSA began to ar­rive in Barcelona loaded with water.

Re­li­gious anec­dotes aside, the man­age­ment mea­sures re­quired by that un­prece­dented drought - the in­ter­na­tional media re­pro­duced im­ages of ships bring­ing drink­ing water to the port of Barcelona, an in­con­ceiv­able event in a major Eu­ro­pean cap­i­tal – left a mark. Fa­cil­i­ties such as the El Prat de­sali­na­tion plant were ac­cel­er­ated and a large-scale in­for­ma­tion cam­paign was also im­ple­mented to pro­mote water-sav­ing at all lev­els. In fact, it is now con­sid­ered the first major en­vi­ron­men­tal aware­ness ef­fort, be­fore the cli­mate issue began mak­ing a harder im­pres­sion on every­day life. The pub­lic re­ac­tion in the met­ro­pol­i­tan area of Barcelona was spec­tac­u­lar, with a water sav­ing of 20% at the most crit­i­cal times.

Who con­sumes most water?

Ac­cord­ing to data col­lected by the Cata­lan Water Agency and pub­lished in its re­view of the man­age­ment plan for the river basin dis­trict of Cat­alo­nia, 72.2% of the water used in the whole re­gion is des­tined to agri­cul­ture; 8.8% to the in­dus­trial, com­mer­cial and ser­vice sec­tors; 1.3% to live­stock; 11.6% to do­mes­tic use; and 6.1% to mu­nic­i­pal and other un­reg­is­tered uses, such as leaks.

How­ever, these per­cent­ages vary sig­nif­i­cantly if the two Cata­lan river basins are taken sep­a­rately: that is, the in­ter­nal basin, with the rivers that flow into Cata­lan ter­ri­tory (Llo­bre­gat, Ter, Muga, Daró, Fluvià, Fran­colí, Foix, Besòs, Gaià, Tordera and Ri­ude­canyes), and the Cata­lan basins of the river Ebre. In the lat­ter, more water is des­tined for agri­cul­tural ir­ri­ga­tion, as much as 94.4%, while in the for­mer this fig­ure is 34.6%. The dif­fer­ence is also sig­nif­i­cant if we look at the per­cent­age of water des­tined for purely do­mes­tic con­sump­tion: 28.7% of water from the in­land basins and 1.5% from those of the Ebre.

This should come as no sur­prise: a large part of Cat­alo­nia is agri­cul­tural, and an­other is urban and in­dus­tri­alised, and this af­fects water re­sources and their avail­abil­ity. Thus, 92% of the Cata­lan pop­u­la­tion is con­cen­trated in the area of the in­land basins, which has only 40% of the avail­able water re­sources. And it is pre­cisely these re­sources, which are man­aged by the Cata­lan Water Agency, that are di­min­ished and most af­fected by this drought. Two reser­voirs can be used as a ref­er­ence to il­lus­trate this. The one in Sau was at 47.95% of its ca­pac­ity in Feb­ru­ary (82.45% a year ago), while the one in Riba-roja d’Ebre was at 92.11% (70.29% last year). This does not mean, how­ever, that there is too much water in the Ebre, nor does it sim­ply in­di­cate that the coun­try’s water man­age­ment is ex­tremely com­plex be­cause the re­sources de­pend on in­creas­ingly vari­able rain­fall.

More pres­sure on sys­tems

“The less water we have, the more com­pli­cated it is to man­age. We know that weather ex­tremes will in­crease: it will prob­a­bly not rain less, but it will be dif­fer­ent. We will have an in­tense drought for longer. And then maybe all the water in the world will fall in two days and we won’t be able to deal with it or take ad­van­tage of it,” ex­plains Sergi Sabater, pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Girona and re­searcher at the Cata­lan In­sti­tute for Water Re­search (ICRA). He adds that the big prob­lem is that we just want and need a lot more water in the sum­mer, which is when there is a higher risk of drought if it has not rained enough in the pre­vi­ous months. “Every­one wants to shower three times a day be­cause it’s hot, we have to water gar­dens and fill swim­ming pools, and we have tourism, which also uses up a lot of water,” he notes.

Sabater em­pha­sises the fac­tor of human pres­sure, which pushes flows to the limit. “To give an ex­am­ple, when you walk through the Gironès and La Selva areas, you see a har­mo­nious and beau­ti­ful agri­cul­tural land­scape, but all of this is at the ex­pense of hav­ing a highly bur­dened hy­dro­log­i­cal sys­tem. The river Onyar has al­ways pre­sented prob­lems. There are sec­tions with­out water or with water that doesn’t flow and is pol­luted. And if you ask old peo­ple in the area, they tell you of sec­tions where in the past you could bathe and fish. And many peo­ple think that this cur­rent del­i­cate sit­u­a­tion is only due to cli­mate change, they’re not aware of human in­ter­ven­tion.”

This is pre­cisely what hap­pened when he spoke to the owner of a large, suc­cess­ful farm, who at­trib­uted the lack of water in the river to the weather and not to the use being made of it.

“We’re grow­ing, which is very good, but we’re not aware of the con­se­quences of this growth,” Sabater says. “We have to keep in mind that as a pop­u­la­tion there are a lot of us and we’re putting more and more pres­sure on the rivers, and on top of that, there isn’t much rain. If we don’t change some of the terms in this equa­tion, the rivers will get worse. For all the water treat­ment plants we build, no mat­ter how much treat­ment we do, it’s not enough,” the re­searcher adds.

ICRA has three lines of work re­lated to water. On the one hand, it fo­cuses on re­sources and ecosys­tems. Sec­ondly, it works on the chem­i­cal, mi­cro­bi­o­log­i­cal and tox­i­co­log­i­cal qual­ity of water (one of its tasks has been to co­or­di­nate analy­ses of the SARS-CoV-2 Waste­water Mon­i­tor­ing Net­work, to give an in­di­ca­tor of the spread of the pan­demic). And fi­nally, the area of tech­nol­ogy ap­plied to op­ti­mis­ing re­sources, en­ergy ef­fi­ciency and cost re­duc­tion in the processes that carry water from rivers to con­sump­tion.

Tech­nol­ogy

In this sce­nario where drought is a la­tent threat, tech­nol­ogy re­lated to water sav­ing and its reuse is vital. “The prob­lem with hav­ing lit­tle water is that every­thing ac­cu­mu­lates in it, so we have to be able to man­age it well to guar­an­tee healthy con­sump­tion. It’s be­lieved that when the water from the Llo­bre­gat river reaches Barcelona, it’s al­ready passed through three toi­lets. In other words, it’s been used and pu­ri­fied three times. That shouldn’t sur­prise us. In­stead, we should learn from coun­tries like Is­rael, which are lead­ers in reuse. They’ve de­vel­oped cut­ting-edge tech­nolo­gies and also have very ad­vanced leg­is­la­tion,” Sabater ex­plains. In Spain, the leg­is­la­tion is more re­stric­tive, and the use of re­gen­er­ated water – which is ob­tained from treat­ment after pu­rifi­ca­tion – can be used for ir­ri­ga­tion, in­dus­try or en­vi­ron­men­tal use, but not for human con­sump­tion. Most of it is re­turned to the en­vi­ron­ment, and in re­cent years re­gen­er­ated water has been used, for ex­am­ple, to im­prove the flow of the river Llo­bre­gat and to stop the salin­i­sa­tion of its aquifers. Ac­cord­ing to ACA data, 53.3 hm³ of re­gen­er­ated water were used dur­ing 2021, com­pared to 39.3 hm³ the pre­vi­ous year, so there is a strong trend to reuse this re­source as the tech­nol­ogy im­proves. How­ever, a com­mit­ment to re­gen­er­at­ing water pre­sents the prob­lem of ge­o­graph­i­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion. The largest pro­duc­ers of waste­water that can be treated are big cities, which are sep­a­rated by sig­nif­i­cant dis­tances from places where this water can be reused to ir­ri­gate crops or im­prove ecosys­tems. And that means high costs.

Di­ver­si­fy­ing

How­ever, so­lu­tions are al­ready being con­sid­ered. Last Feb­ru­ary, the or­gan­i­sa­tions En­gi­neers With­out Bor­ders, Ecol­o­gists in Ac­tion and Water is Life pre­sented the study Water and Cli­mate Emer­gency in the Barcelona Met­ro­pol­i­tan Area (AMB). The aim of this re­search is to di­ver­sify mea­sures to ob­tain new water re­sources be­yond large in­fra­struc­ture, such as de­sali­na­tion plants, which need a lot of en­ergy to op­er­ate. One op­tion is to make the most of rain­wa­ter by build­ing tanks so that it can be stored be­fore it goes into the sewer sys­tem, where it will be­come too con­t­a­m­i­nated. Ac­cord­ing to this study, up to 80% of rain­wa­ter could be used in the AMB, whereas only 5% is cur­rently used.

Ac­cord­ing to the above or­gan­i­sa­tions, re­cov­er­ing aquifers and re­nat­u­ral­is­ing rivers and cities are other op­tions for di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion, so as not to have to rely on the water of the fu­ture only from large treat­ment fa­cil­i­ties. This will also pre­vent the rise in water bills under the pre­text of rais­ing en­ergy prices. In fact, Agbar has pro­posed a 7.4% in­crease in tar­iffs in 2022, al­though it has not yet been ap­proved and Barcelona City Coun­cil clearly op­poses the mea­sure. It is worth re­mem­ber­ing that Agbar con­trols 70% of Aigües de Barcelona, which is the sup­plier of 23 mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties in the met­ro­pol­i­tan area. Al­though con­sid­ered a pub­lic asset, the man­age­ment of water that reaches Cata­lan homes is still mostly pri­vate, so it is used com­mer­cially.

Ac­cord­ing to the re­port men­tioned ear­lier, be­yond con­cern for the uses of water or ap­pli­ca­tion of a busi­ness logic to its con­sump­tion, there is real con­cern over the power ac­quired by pri­vate com­pa­nies through the sys­tem of water source con­ces­sions. “Some cor­po­ra­tions ac­cu­mu­late rights over col­lec­tion points, some of which were granted dur­ing the Franco era and under the aus­pices of rules and cri­te­ria that do not meet the chal­lenges or needs of the cur­rent sce­nario of cli­mate emer­gency,” the re­port’s au­thors say.

An­other cause for con­cern is that it is in times of drought that the gov­ern­ment pro­poses short-term so­lu­tions that could have en­vi­ron­men­tal con­se­quences. “We’re con­cerned that politi­cians want to cover im­me­di­ate and ur­gent needs with­out mak­ing any pre­dic­tions about the fu­ture. We’re hop­ing they don’t take us by sur­prise,” warns An­dreu Escolà, rep­re­sen­ta­tive of GEPEC-EdC, an eco­log­i­cal or­gan­i­sa­tion that works mainly in the south­ern re­gions of Cat­alo­nia. Escolà re­calls that dur­ing the drought of 2007 and 2008, the Span­ish gov­ern­ment ap­proved an ex­ten­sion of the Ebre to bring water to Barcelona, a very con­tro­ver­sial mea­sure that ul­ti­mately stalled be­cause it rained enough be­fore the work began.

Escolà, to­gether with a fel­low ac­tivist, is im­mersed in a law­suit in de­fence of the Siu­rana river. The com­plainants are the Com­mu­nity of Ir­ri­ga­tors of the Ri­ude­canyes Reser­voir, a pri­vate com­pany that has the rights to ex­ploit the water of the river. “But only 40% of the water is used for ir­ri­ga­tion, 60% is for the town coun­cils,” ex­plains Escolà. This is an­other step in a con­flict over the water from the Siu­rana be­tween the Pri­o­rat re­gion – which loses it, leav­ing the river dry for most of the year - and the Baix Camp re­gion, which con­sumes most of it. “Once it has passed through the treat­ment plants, a lot of water is dis­carded into the sea, when it could un­dergo a ter­tiary treat­ment. And in many places there’s ground­wa­ter that could also be used, but it’s pol­luted. Macro-farms and in­ten­sive agri­cul­ture are dam­ag­ing this re­source, and no one is wor­ried about this, not even in the De­part­ment of Cli­mate Ac­tion,” Escolà con­cludes.