Lisbon, Sept. 26, 2024 (Lusa) - An association contesting various tourist projects planned for Tróia in the Setúbal district warned on Thursday that construction must stop to avoid irreversible damage to the landscape and ecosystems.
‘We're talking about four plots of land on the Troia Peninsula that haven't yet been built on and could be safeguarded. It's the last minute we have to do this,’ said Maria Santos, from the Dunas Livres association, in parliament.
Leaders of the association were heard this afternoon at the Parliament's Environment and Energy Committee, in Lisbon, as part of the delivery of the petition ‘For the Preservation of the Natural Heritage of the Troia Peninsula’, with 10,642 signatures.
Maria Santos told MPs that the authorities should not allow resorts to be built on that land because, she claimed, ‘these are habitats that will never return’, where ‘species that are completely at risk of extinction’ live.
‘And all of this should already be protected by the Natura [2000] Network or [by the protection instruments of the] Sado Estuary Nature Reserve,’ he emphasised, insisting that the destruction “is going to be irreversible and the government is not taking care of the situation”.
The Dunas Livres (Free Dunes) association members pointed the finger at the CDU-run Grândola City Council for considering that, a few years ago, it could have changed the Municipal Master Plan (PDM) to limit tourism development in the municipality.
Addressing the parliamentarians, Maria Santos also criticised the Alentejo Regional Coordination and Development Commission (CCDR), saying that the body ‘approves some projects on the spur of the moment and without any logic’.
‘An Environmental Impact Study says that a [certain] project has negative environmental and social impacts and the conclusion that comes from the Alentejo CCDR is that, taking all this into account, the opinion is positive,’ she said.
Rebeca Mateus, from the same association, said she was surprised that ‘the very entities that approve the projects are the ones that are going to supervise’ the course of the works, advocating changes to these procedures.
For her part, Dunas Livres leader Maria Santos emphasised that the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF) and the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA) ‘are entities with huge responsibilities’, but ‘their resources are being reduced’.
‘They have no resources, there are no technicians, there isn't even a vehicle for the field [in the Alentejo] and these organisations are responsible for giving opinions on projects covering thousands of hectares that are irreversibly destroying the territory,’ she stressed.
According to Maria Santos, the heads of the organisations that issue opinions ‘are appointed as political positions and are completely incompetent’, so often the technicians write one thing, and whoever is in charge ‘decides completely the opposite’.
‘The ICNF was the only entity that gave unfavourable opinions on these projects,’ she recalled, saying that she knows that “the technicians are under constant pressure and threats to give other opinions”.
The Dunas Livres association, she stressed, advocates an urgent end to the classification as a Project of National Interest (PIN) and the ‘Golden Visa’ programme and all the country's efforts to get out of non-compliance with the Habitats Directive and the Birds Directive.
‘We're paying fines of thousands of euros to the European Union because we haven't implemented the directives properly,’ so it was important to “outline a proper Natura Network that would include this land,” he added.
The MPs acknowledged the need for more supervision and possibly an adaptation of the tourism projects in question. Still, some recognised that reversing what had already been authorised would be difficult.
At the end of the hearing, the rapporteur, Margarida Saavedra (PSD), announced that the petition ‘will be analysed in plenary’.
SM/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
