M. Ramón Llamas

Conflicts between wetland conservation and groundwater exploitation: Two case histories in Spain

The problems in two Spanish national parks located on wetlands are analyzed. The hydrogeological and ecological characteristics of the two parks are somewhat different as are their respective degrees of deterioration.The Tablas de Daimiel National Park is located on the Central Plateau of Spain. It used to consist of a marshy area of about 20 km2 around the confluence of two relatively small rivers. The area was marshy mainly because it was the natural discharge zone for a Tertiary aquifer system about 100 m thick extending over an area of some 5,000 km2, composed of calcareous and detrital material of continental origin. The average annual recharge has been estimated at approximately 350 hm3/yr. Current groundwater withdrawal is around 450 hm3/yr, mainly used to irrigate a surface area of some 1,000 km2. This overdevelopment has led to a continuous depletion of the regional water table and eventually to the drying out of the marshy area. Spontaneous combustion or fires caused by man have occurred in about 10 km2 of the desiccated areas since the spring of 1986.The Doñana National Park is located on the estuary of the River Guadalquivir. The aquifer system of the Lower Guadalquivir estuary consists essentially of a permeable formation of unconsolidated Plioquaternary materials with an area of some 3,000 km2. Under the marshy area (about 1,800 km2) the aquifer system is confined below low-permeability estuary deposits which can be over 100 m thick. Around most of the marshland the aquifer crops out and is recharged by rain. The Doñana National Park is over 700 km2 in size, part of which is in the marshland and part in the recharge area where the aquifer is phreatic. In the 1970s Spains largest irrigation project using groundwater, covering a surface area of 240 km2, was planned in an area bordering on the national park. The initial project has been scaled down considerably as a result of protests by conservation groups. However, it seems likely that the water table depletion as a result of pumpage for irrigation could cause a large part of the ecotone situated at the contact-line between the marshland and the phreatic aquifer to disappear. This ecotone exists because it is a natural groundwater dischange area.

Vulnerability assessment of groundwater resources: A modelling-based approach to the Mancha Occidental aquifer, Spain

The semiarid Mancha Occidental aquifer represents a paradigmatic case of intensive groundwater use for agriculture. Irrigation has proven a catalyst for welfare in the area over the last three decades, if at a significant environmental cost and while raising concerns as to its mid-term sustainability. This paper describes an interdisciplinary exercise of scenario design and modelling, providing a methodology to couple hard-science numerical modelling approaches with the involvement of key water actors. Given the long-standing conflicts in the area, modelling work largely focuses on carrying out a vulnerability assessment rather than on trying to find solutions. The systems most resilient aspects and its drivers for change are identified, while their potential implications for aquifer sustainability are assessed under the light of the mandatory objectives established by the European Union Water Framework Directive for all Member States. Whereas modelling results imply that such objectives are unlikely to be met, a vulnerability assessment suggests that even adverse scenario pumping patterns could be sustained in the mid- to long-term (two to four decades).

Water Crisis: Myth or Reality?

This chapter attempts to bring together a set of disparate concepts that are fundamental to examining water as a resource and establishing the seriousness of the current and future water scarcity. As is well known, there is a plentiful supply of water considered at a global scale. However, as we examine scales much closer to individual humans, a pattern of great heterogeneity emerges. Some parts of the world have plentiful supplies of water, others have severe droughts; some plenty of high quality water, others with badly polluted waters; in some the rivers flow full, in others they are devoid of water for many days of the year. It would be simple if these differences were due only to the physical climate, but careful examination shows that there are large differences within the same climate zones that cannot be explained purely by climate and topography. In these cases, one sees the hands of human interference in terms of governance, property rights, and sheer population size. The situation may become much more serious in the badly impacted areas as the great climate change experiment unfolds. There is huge uncertainly associated with the predictions of climate for the 21st century. The chapter is able to be optimistic in the face of such uncertainty by pointing to several technical, economic, and social developments that can reduce the human footprint on the scarce supplies of easily accessible water. By relying more on rainfed agriculture and agricultural trade to meet food needs scarce irrigation water can focus upon higher value and less water using crops or can be diverted to high value municipal and industrial uses; improving the efficiency of current irrigation technologies will free up large quantities of water for other uses; relying upon new ecological sanitation techniques can greatly reduce the impact on water quality; and low cost breakthroughs of desalination cost which are now economically competitive with alternative sources of fresh water to meet the needs of urban populations anywhere in the world. In order for these solutions to the emerging crisis to be adopted much more attention will have to be paid as to how we as individuals and communities approach and the world community approaches the governance of water. A successful shift to effective governance will enable us to have sustainable water supplies for all well through the

Lessons Learnt from the Impact of the Neglected Role of Groundwater in Spain's Water Policy

Abstract Spain is the most arid country in Europe. Issues and conflicts related to water management are more relevant to the countrys development than that of in other European countries. In July of 2001 the Spanish Parliament enacted the Law of the National Water Plan. This Plan has induced considerable controversy among diverse social sectors and lobbies: political parties, farmers associations, large construction firms, conservation groups, scholars, and others. The real role of groundwater in Spain was practically ignored in the initial proposal for the National Water Plan (NWP). The approved bill included a series of provisions about groundwater which, if they are enforced, will make it difficult to maintain some old paradigms. One of these is the need to continue the large subsides to build large hydraulic structures. One such structure is the aqueduct of the Ebro River, designed for the transfer of water to several Mediterranean regions. Spain is the country-except four small countries- with the largest number of large dams per person. It is also the country of the European Union which uses the lowest proportion of groundwater for urban water supply. This may be the result of the central governments policy in the nineteenth Century which restricted the use of groundwater as the source of supply for Madrid. This policy later spread trough out the rest of the country. Nevertheless, farmers do not usually follow the governments paradigms and during the last 30 to 40 years they have considerably increased the use of groundwater for irrigation. Today about one million hectares, out of a total of 3.5 million hectares, are irrigated with groundwater. The economic value of the crops and the employment generated by the use of groundwater irrigation is higher than that from surface water irrigation. It can be said that groundwater irrigation has produced significantly “more crops and jobs per drop”. Most of this spectacular agricultural development has been made with scarce planning and very limited control by the government water authorities. This has induced legal and ecological chaos in a few regions. The National Water Plan is a blend of new and old paradigms. The lobbies of the followers of the old paradigms are still pewerful and it is presently difficult to foresee which will be the practical results of this plan.

Transboundary Water Resources in the Iberian Peninsula

In the early 1990s central and southern areas in the Iberian Peninsula underwent a serious drought that catalysed water-related conflicts between Portugal and Spain and between some Spanish autonomous regions. Average annual renewable water availability in Spain is about 3,000 m3 per person; in Portugal about 6,000 m3. Nevertheless, because of the great variability of the natural hydrological cycle in Spain, the net natural water availability would be only from 300 to 500 m3 per person annually. In order to improve the availability of water, 1,000 reservoirs have been built in this century and almost one million water wells have been drilled. Engineering structures for interbasin water transfers have been built with a total capacity about 1.5 km3 per year; the most important is the Tagus-Segura aqueduct, designed to export up to 1 km3 per year. In reality, less than one-third of this volume has been transferred but it has induced frequent and bitter social and legal conflicts between the central government, autonomous governments, municipalities, conservation groups, farmers associations and others. In April 1993 the Spanish government asked the National Water Council to assess its proposal for a National Water Plan, which included several new water transfers. This proposal has triggered new water conflicts not only with Portugal, but also between autonomous regions and even between neighbouring towns. This chapter analyses the technical, ethical and aesthetic causes of these ‘water wars’, and argues that most water conflicts in the Iberian Peninsula can be solved without great difficulty if the general public was better informed and economic lobbies kept in their place.

Data and Limitations

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a detailed description of data sources and the limitations of the study based on these data.

Erratum to: Groundwater mining: benefits, problems and consequences in Spain

The original article has erroneously been published in volume 3, issue 3. The article belongs to the special issue on Sustainable Resource Management: Water Practice Issues.

Bringing the Analysis to the Policy Context

This chapter attempts to bring the evaluations reported in Chaps. 5 and 6 to the policy context, by looking at economic performance, variations and causal relationships associated with agricultural and water policies. We start by reviewing changes in land productivity, both rainfed and irrigated, from a temporal and spatial perspective. Since agricultural policies are markedly different across Spanish provinces, and since the EU Common Agricultural Policy also changed over the 1996–2006 study period, our spatial and temporal analysis yields conclusions about how Spanish agriculture has changed, notably in irrigated vs. rainfed farming, with profound impacts on the patterns of water use in agriculture. In the second section, we offer a dynamic analysis of the economic incentives for inter-basin and intra-basin surface transfers, with water scarcity being the major driving force. Water allocation and economic efficiency across regions and basins are the main focus of this section.

Spain’s Water Footprint

The purpose of this chapter is to report the footprint evaluations obtained at the national, regional and river basin levels for 1997–2006. The procedures and data sources used to generate the results were presented in Chaps. 3 and 4. A similar though slightly different approach was used in the case of the Guadiana river basin, which can be found in Aldaya and Llamas (2008a, b, 2009). This chapter first of all reviews the water footprint on a national scale and then focuses on the Guadiana river basin.

Net Virtual-Water “Flows”

Global trade establishes an “invisible” and indirect link between water demand and water consumption sites. The literature on virtual-water “trade” has emphasised the options available to arid and semiarid countries to use international trade to deal with water resources scarcity (Allan 2003; Yang and Zehnder 2005; Chapagain et al. 2006a; Ma et al. 2006; Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture 2007; Yang and Zehnder 2007; Aldaya et al. 2008a, b; Novo et al. 2009). However, determining whether this strategy is economically and environmentally efficient will depend on whether the real opportunity cost of water resources is properly internalised, and whether the trade is actually based on differences in competitive advantage among trading partners. It is also doubtful that “virtual-water trade” is termed a “strategy”, because no government or agent pursues it directly. Rather, it is a process that is naturally linked to trade and the exchange of goods, with the exception of Arid and Semi-Arid countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.