SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Oct. 25 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Minister of Ecological Transition and Energy of the Government of the Canary Islands, Mariano H. Zapata, announced today Wednesday in the Plenary Session of the Chamber that his department is already working to carry out an updated census of discharges into the sea and provide real solutions with the entities that have powers, such as city councils and councils.
Mariano H. Zapata indicated that the Ministry has already drawn up a roadmap whose ultimate goal will be to improve the quality of the waters of the archipelago and the marine environment through different projects that will support the administrations competent in matters of discharges.
The counselor assured that with a total of 434 points of discharge into the sea throughout the Canary Islands, and in view of the “immobility” detected in the control of wastewater, whose Order is more than 30 years old, “we are not going to sit idly by.” . “We want to detect the current situation, update data and provide real solutions with the entities that have powers, such as councils and city councils,” he said.
“Given the demands posed by the territory, whose reality in terms of discharges is very disparate, this department considers it a priority to make modifications that integrate the advances in this matter and in the legislative framework, with modernized equipment and its digitalization,” Zapata added. “All this, with the objective of putting at the service of citizens, entities and public administrations, different instruments that help to identify spills more quickly and also to raise public awareness,” he indicated.
To this end, the Ministry has put on the table a Mitigation Plan, the main axis of which is the creation of a new discharge census, thus updating the latest recorded data, which dates back to 2021, and the development of a campaign to detect new unregistered discharges into the sea, using our own means, which will act both through direct observation (land and boats), as well as aerial (drones) and underwater (through immersions). In the latter case, the forecast for this plan is its development throughout 2024 and half of 2025.
This new, more modern study will take into account the general characteristics of the spill, the quality of the waters in the spill area, the impact on the seabed, the flora and fauna affected, as well as its state of conservation, carrying out dives in the affected areas to assess the impact on the environment as a whole.
The future Circular Economy Law of the Canary Islands will contemplate a discharge fee, with a finalist nature, which implies that those who pollute the most are those who contribute the most economic amount, thus encouraging better treatment of wastewater, reducing the number of discharges into the sea. and their polluting load.
Likewise, training and advice campaigns will be promoted, both for universities and researchers in the field, as well as for public administrations themselves, with the aim of making administrative tasks as agile as possible. Along these same lines, projects will be subsidized to eliminate dumping points.
