Spanish officials banned the use of fertilizers near one of Europe’s largest saltwater lagoons because five tons of dead fish washed up on the coast.
Alarm bell Start to ring In the southeastern region of Murcia last week, dozens of small fish and shrimps began to appear on the beaches of the coastal lagoon Mar Menor.
District officials closed eight beaches because residents complained that the waters of the lagoon-once popular with tourists-were cloudy, green and smelly.
Anse biologist Ángel Sallent said that after more than a week, dead fish continued to appear, albeit in small numbers. Spain.
He added that the five-ton figure calculated by the local government may be underestimated. “We have already dived and we can see dead fish on the seabed,” he said. “We may never be able to quantify the number of dead animals.”
For years, ecologists have warned that decades of nitrate-rich runoff (mainly from agriculture) is choking life in the lagoon. These runoffs have triggered a large number of algae blooms-described as extreme eutrophication-consumption. Exhausted the oxygen in the water.
The lagoon is adjacent to Campo Cartagena, a vast intensive agricultural area that has expanded tenfold in the past four years. Covering an area of approximately 60,000 hectares, the region has helped transform the region into one of Spain’s main fruit and vegetable production areas, and most of its products are eventually sold to supermarkets in Northern Europe.
The lagoon is also under pressure from the poor sewage system of nearby towns. In recent decades, with the development of tourism in the area and the discharge of mining activities, the sewage system has flourished.
In 2016, the blooming of algae made the waters of Mar Menor green and Killed 85% In 2019, after thousands of dead fish and crustaceans were washed away in the same area, the marine vegetation on the seabed was once again affected.
On Wednesday, Spain’s Environment Minister Teresa Ribera accused regional officials of turning a blind eye to violations on farmland next to the lagoon.
She emphasized the lack of “sufficient irrigation rights” for 8,000 hectares of land, which means that some lands “take water illegally or use water far beyond the allocated range”.
Agricultural groups have long opposed this claim, believing that they comply with all environmental legislation.
The ban on the use of inorganic nitrogen fertilizer within 1.5 kilometers of the lagoon on Wednesday was welcomed by ecologists, who have been calling for action for years. “We thought this was a good step, but it came too late,” Salente said.
He called on local and central governments to take urgent action, such as curbing intensive agricultural practices in the area and creating wetlands around the lagoon that can act as “green filters”, otherwise incidents like the one in the past week may become more frequent. .
“Unfortunately. This is a gem, a single location that may be a national park at some point,” he said. “But on the contrary, in the 1970s and 1980s, it was betting on radical urban development and later also very radical intensive agriculture. They prioritized these economic sectors, but they had forgotten the environment.”
