The expiration of the Environmental Impact Statement has practically sentenced the Fonsalía port project, in the municipality of Guía de Isora. Once the six-year period has expired, expired in December 2020, which stipulates the Environmental Impact Law, the Ministry of Public Works, responsible for the project, must now decide whether to carry out a new study, starting the entire declaration process from scratch. environmental legislation and with a much more demanding legislation than the previous one or abandon the project, as happened with the regasification plant in Tenerife, which was parked when the environmental declaration expired.
But the wind blows against Isoran infrastructure. Neither the current legislation nor the environmental aspects surrounding Fonsalía’s macro-project are the same as when the first technical meetings began in the early 1990s.
Speaking to DIARIO DE AVISOS, José Antonio Valbuena, Minister of Ecological Transition, Fight against Climate Change and Territorial Planning, was blunt yesterday: “There are many elements that make the execution of that port almost unfeasible; If already with the previous legislation of 2008, the environmental impact statement came out with 25 conditions, many of them very difficult to solve, now it will be very difficult to raise a statement and make it positive, because the legislation places a lot of emphasis on studying zero alternatives , which in our case is to improve the exit from Los Cristianos and the current uses of the port of Granadilla de Abona ”.
The counselor advanced that his department has commissioned a study from the University of La Laguna on the environmental values that surround the surroundings of Fonsalía and the Special Conservation Zone (ZEC), which he will transfer to the Department of Public Works and Transportation directed by Sebastián Franquis before to decide whether to return to the starting box and start a new environmental impact study – what Valbuena describes as a “waste of time”, because the result of the declaration “will surely be negative” – or to resign from the project.
Damages higher than the 2014 study
“In recent years, a series of scientific studies have been highlighted that lead me to say that it is fortunate that this work could not be started because, had it been carried out, the environmental damage caused would have been much higher than what it already had. the environmental impact study itself for 2014 was planned, ”said Valbuena, who recalled that the marine area around Fonsalía is one of the three places in the world classified as a Whale Heritage Site, as well as a space for feeding and breeding turtles marine, which in his opinion makes the maritime strip that separates Tenerife and La Gomera into “one of the richest waters in biodiversity in the Atlantic Ocean.”
