Portugal needs a new water management policy

Ensuring the rational use of water resources and reducing losses in systems are essential measures for intelligent water management and ensuring availability for human, animal, agricultural, forestry and industrial consumption.

The structural nature of the hydrological drought situation in the Algarve and Alentejo regions led the PS government, in 2020, to move forward with the preparation of Regional Water Efficiency Plans. The fundamental essence of these plans is to involve the entire community and ensure regional pacts for the solidarity, intelligent, efficient and sustainable use of water. The pacts were designed to assess the management of water availability, estimating water availability and the evolution of consumption in the river basin regions, considering the most serious scenarios in meteorological terms, as well as including the methodologies to be used in the assessment of prospective scenarios that take into account the effects of climate change. Currently, the four river basins managed by Portugal and Spain have lost 20% of their runoff. It is urgent to identify and study the problem in order to act in a well-founded and sustained manner.

We must increasingly develop models that strengthen the management and efficiency of water availability in each river basin, but also promote the storage and reinforcement of river basins. As is currently happening in Spain, we must evaluate the possibility of supplying water between river basins, or assess aquifer reinforcement technology.

Reinforcement between river basins is a delicate matter. However, given the current “water emergency” that the Iberian Peninsula is experiencing, it is one of the issues that should increasingly be discussed at a national level.

Although the Portuguese-Spanish Agreement governing the shared use of water resources is internationally recognized as a success story, due to the harmonious relationship between the two countries, water will be a scarce resource that could generate tensions.

In the Iberian case, there are aspirations and expectations on the part of each country, but there is always some controversy associated with periods of scarcity, as we have seen in recent years.

The context of climate change in which we live will worsen this dependence, and in Spain there is already a significant number of dams that guarantee the regulation of inflows, and an increase in storage capacity is even expected, through new dams that will allow for the minimization of drought and flood situations.

Just as an example, in the Guadiana basin in Portugal, Alqueva, with 4,135 hm3 of storage, creates the largest artificial lake in Europe. In Spain, the Guadiana gathers, upstream, through a large set of dams, around twice the storage capacity of Alqueva.

We must be proactive in addressing water irregularities associated with climate change, longer periods of drought, interspersed with periods of heavy rainfall and runoff, which lead to extreme events.

Knowing the territory, engaging in dialogue with the public and private sectors and experiencing its problems is essential when planning public policies. There cannot and should be no dogmas in the management and use of water in Portugal. We must therefore begin studying the reinforcement of river basins based on the interconnection of different river basin regions, exclusively within national territory.

In fact, in recent years, Portugal has developed a project to divert water from the Guadiana to the Sado, a lesson that should be taken into account. The environmental and heritage impacts associated with this solution must also be considered, as well as the important infrastructure required to implement it. The PS worked on a draft resolution (PJR 518/XVI/1.ª) that clearly presents our vision for the current water emergency that the country is experiencing, advocating, in particular, a new model of institutional water governance that involves a single management of the resource in Portugal, which allows us to reflect on the limits to the ownership of underground water resources (similar to other countries where drought and scarcity are a reality), and which deepens the legal instruments for managing and using the resource, such as the Water Law or the Legal Framework for Water Reuse.

Portugal must analyse and study on the ground at the level of each of the basins, of its large rivers, and especially in the section whose drainage basin is of particular interest to the national territory, in order to increase the storage and the capacity to regulate the inflows over which we are sovereign.