Portugal’s pro-oil Environment Minister, João Pedro Matos Fernandes, is concerned about rising water levels and their effect on the national coastline but the €150 million set aside to bolster coastal defences is not yet spent and he is keen to approve more work.
At a Lisbon seminar, ‘The Coastal Zone of Portugal - how can we defend it?’ the minister said that the programme already has seen the approval of 50 kilometres of coastal work but the work needs to be accelerated.
"I believe that between the end of this year and next year we will have implemented works along the coast to a value of about €70 million, approximately half the programme budget,” said Fernandes
The Minister added that in July, right at the start of the busy summer tourism season, nine projects will commence along the northern west coast and a tender will be launched for only a part of the dredging project for the Aveiro estuary.
The Minister highlighted the importance of this coastal work as climate change "is very noticeable along the Portuguese coast and the rise in the average sea level is an unquestionable fact," yet many projects remain at planning stage.
Portugal will be one of the territories in Europe most affected by rising sea levels and changes in waves and currents, with erosion accentuated by more frequent and more violent storms and Fernandes said that it is essential to ensure that the smallest possible amount of land is lost.
About 80% of Portugal’s GDP is generated in the area adjacent to the sea, with 75% of the Portuguese population living within 50 kilometres of the coast.
While work continues to secure coastal areas, the minister and others in the government are all for the development of an oil and gas exploration and extraction programme and also have been lured by the mirage of riches from deep sea mining, despite the ecological damage such controversial techniques would cause.
The threat of oil spills along coastal stretches that disproportionally would affect coastal populations and business - much of which is dependent on tourism - has been dismissed by an administration that imagines royalties rolling in to the Treasury for little effort.
Some of the coastal plan interventions (POOC) along the Algarve’s shoreline have been more to do with tourism than the predicted effects of rising sea levels with the regional environmental association suffering heavy criticism for its work, especially at Praia Donana, Lagos, and other beach areas.
Matos Fernandes also has been in charge of the demolitions on the low-lying Algarve islands of Faro and Culatra, work that was legitimised at first on safety grounds and later on the alleged illegality of the dwellings. Chaos ensued.
The minister’s coastal defence plan is behind schedule and needs to be implemented but without the brutality shown in the Algarve's Ria Formosa island area where sand was classified as more important than people.
