Ecologistas en Acción opines that it is essential to take measures to avoid sealing fertile ground due to unsustainable town-planning growth and construction of new infrastructures – especially in transport – which creates serious environmental effects, as well as reducing the current water demand and transforming the economic model based on environment destruction. This year is especially relevant because of the eighth session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (COP 8).

In Ecologistas en Acción's view, the main concern about desertification in Spain is the fertile ground loss, which constitutes a high-valuable non-renewable natural resource, on account of ground damage which is provoked by built-up areas and infrastructures construction and is occupying irreversibly fluvial valleys, traditional irrigated crops and others kinds of high valuable farming ground. In 1992, Spain was the most affected European country by the irreversible loss of fertile ground due to built-up areas and since then, this building-up tendency has been increasing and even spreading to the best land.

Nowadays, this worrying process is seriously accelerating, helped by a generalized town-planning speculation, which is destroying irreversibly the most fertile and best quality farming ground. It is very curious and contradictory, the apparent preoccupation with the possible erosion in low quality farming areas, like natural areas with marl, when the really fertile ground from agricultural valleys are disappearing irreversibly and exponentially because of the soil classification fever, the town-planning –tourist speculation, the built-up areas and resort construction, and the highways and infrastructures proliferation, which doesn't attract a so especial preoccupation.

Desertification in Spain is not mainly due to environmental erosion problems. Moreover, when we identify aridity with desertification we reinforce the erroneous perception of naming natural thicket (steppes, salt-affected soils in alluvial plains – called saladares-, etc.) ‘deteriorated areas', what makes even more difficult its conservation (e.g. turning them into industrial estates, rubbish tips or any kind of infrastructures), which leads to an alarming landscape quality and environmental loss. On the other hand, this false image has justified a terrible forest policy, full of inadequate reforestation processes, which damaged habitats of Communitarian concern and communities with high ecological and natural value, and it also damaged their biodiversity value.

Ecologistas en Acción believes that the main desertification problems in Spain are caused by different erosion processes, such as the unsustainable water use and the fertile ground irreversible loss by building-up and construction of infrastructures. Regarding the water use, the enormous increase of irrigated crops and more recently the accelerated town-planning –tourist expansion have provoked and unsustainable water use and a serious overexploitation of aquifers, provoking wetlands destruction and irreversible natural productivity loss of these high valuable landscapes linked to water, irreversible loss that leads to an important desertification process, which is not considered as it should really be by the public authorities.

Therefore, in order to stop the desertification process in Spain, Ecologistas en Acción urges the implementation of policies to obtain:

  • Regional land laws that guarantee its conservation and make difficult the soil classification as building land.
  • A water policy based on managing its demand and not on increasing its supply. That is to say, treating water as the scarce good it is; a good that must be highly protected.
  • Changing the Spanish economic model based on environment destruction, in which construction and mass tourism (both very linked to desertification) are essential keys for the GDP. In the building policy terms, this is translated into compact towns of medium size. In hydroelectric energy terms, into a kind of respectful agriculture with the surrounding climatic conditions.