Against the European standards which Portugal’s water resources now are measured, only 52% of the stuff reaches the quality insisted on by legislation, according to an analysis of the proposed new National Water Plan.
This means that half of the country's rivers and reservoirs remain polluted fifteen years after the adoption of a European directive to clean up the country’s water by 2015.
The EU approved Water Framework Directive was issued back in 2000 to ensure that water across the union was of ‘good’ standard but only 52% of the Portugal’s surface water resources are categorised as ‘good’ after damning chemical analysis and poor performance against ecological criteria.
In the Guadiana region of the Alentejo and Algarve the quality situation is worse than the national average with 61% of public water supplies falling below the status required.
This diagnosis is contained in a new National Water Plan whose public consultation ended last Friday with further public consultation on the plans for each water region ending this December.
This consultation documents now aims to achieve in the next 12 years what the water industry has singularly failed to achieve in the past 15.
The Secretary of State for the Environment, Paulo Lemos said that the latest wave of European money soon to crash onto Portugal's shores is being targeted for investments to get Portugal’s water quality back on track and ‘EC legal’ in order to avoid further conflict with the European Commission.
"We do not want to leave the next government the inheritance that the previous one left us," says Paul Lemos, using the 'last lot' defence to blame his failure on the socialist government of José Sócrates which left office in 2011.
The original EU Water Framework Directive wanted Portugal’s rivers, lakes and reservoirs to be of ‘good’ quality by the end of 2015 but Lemos has gone for an extension of the deadline to 2027.
This leeway is only possible for certain water areas if it was technically impossible to do everything within the last 15 years or, more pertinently, if the costs were judged by Lemos to be disproportionately high.
"There is no European country that has achieved overall ‘good’ status in 2015. It is a titanic effort," says Lemos and for once he is right but Portugal still lags far behind the other laggards.
Portugal’s bright new promise is by 2021 to get 73% of the nation’s water towards the EU’s quality water benchmark, and to 100% by 2027.
One of the major problems in the National Water Plan is that there are yawning gaps in the monitoring of water quality in rivers and estuaries where only 50% have monitoring stations operating, one of which is in the Algarve.
Investment in, and maintenance of the water network by the Portuguese Environment Agency collapsed in 2010. The Agency’s laboratory lost its certification so could not analyse anything much, not legally anyway, and the government was handed the grant of €4 million to sort out water monitoring systems.
There remain deficiencies in Portugal’s water monitoring network and another €4 million needs to be spent by 2020 with the contracts not yet out to tender.
Eco-organisation Quercus sees the bright side and commented that at least these failures are "a good diagnosis of the current situation."
Another NGO, GEOTA which ‘defends the environment,’ said in its commentary on the National Water Plan consultation document, that "the targets were unambitious, there’s insufficient information, the risk of various failures is significant, there was a weak economic evaluation of the cost-benefit of the measures, and there were gaps in the monitoring."
Of the EU grant money so far thrown at the problem of Portugal’s water quality, much has been wasted as of the 526 projects funded since 2007 at least 52 have failed to meet the European standards for which they were designed.
Many of these were sewage treatment plants primarily to deal with urban sewage but little attempt has been made to analyse and deal with pollution from agricultural production and the food industry which finds its way into rivers and reservoirs.
Paulo Lemos argues that although the current situation is still problematic, this does not mean that nothing has been done. "For 20 years, we had 24% of the population with access to of sanitation, now we have 78%."
Progress indeed but when overall progress is measured against the raft of EU targets, the country’s water reserves are not in as good a shape as the Secretary of State would have us believe.
The National Water Plan, even though the public consultation period is over, still is unlikely to appear before the October elections.
