News from the Ground

Spain fined €12 million for failing to treat urban waste water

26 July 2018

Nearly 18 years after deadline expired, nine municipalities still lack proper collection or treatment systems.

The European Court of Justice on Wednesday ordered Spain to pay a €12 million fine for prolonged failure to comply with a European directive on urban waste water collection and treatment.

In an earlier judgment issued in 2011, this court had found that there were still 43 agglomerations with a population of 15,000 or more that failed to meet EU standards, even though member states were supposed to have adequate collection and treatment systems in place since 2001.

Spain was given a 2013 deadline to comply, but the deadline expired and 17 localities were still discharging their waste water without proper treatment.

In 2017, the EU Commission brought new action, and the Court of Justice has now fined Spain a lump sum of €12 million, plus a penalty payment of €11 million for every six-month period of delay in getting the remaining municipalities up to speed on their water treatment standards.

As of today, there are nine Spanish municipalities that still fail to meet EU urban waste water regulations: seven in Andalusia (Matalascañas, Alhaurín el Grande, Isla Cristina, Tarifa, Coín, Nerja and Barbate), one in Asturias (Gijón Este) and one in the Canary Islands (Valle de Güímar).

Social agreement for water in defense of our rivers and for public water

March, 22, 2018

A wide range of (Spanish) civil society organizations and entities agree that we are facing a really decisive moment to recover and maintain the good state of conservation of our aquatic ecosystems, not only to comply with the Water Framework Directive and other commitments. Europeans in this area, but to adapt to the reality imposed by climate change, reduce our vulnerability to the growing risks of drought and floods and ensure sustainable use of water, with demands adapted to the resources actually available. On the other hand, we face privatization pressures, both in terms of the commodification of water rights and the privatization of water and sanitation services and even irrigation management.

The unsustainable growth of water demands, both in irrigation and urban-industrial uses, is currently one of the main problems to achieve a sustainable use of water and the good ecological status of our ecosystems.

30 cities join Global Sur and Hasankeyf Action Day

As part of the Global Sur and Hasankeyf Action Day in almost 30 cities actions have been organized on April 28, 2018. Activists and civil organization raised awareness on the ongoing destruction of the two antique cities Sur and Hasankeyf at the Tigris River in North (Turkish) Kurdistan. In the last years Sur and Hasankeyf have become synonyms for the repressive and exploitative policy of the Turkish government against nature, culture und people.

The 12.000 years old town Hasankeyf and the surrounding Tigris Valley are threatened by the Mega-Dam Ilisu Dam in construction which is one of the most controversial dam projects in the world nowadays. It would destroy the livelihoods of up to 80.000 people in North Kurdistan and probably much more in Syria and particularly in Iraq.

Sur is the old town of Diyarbakir which has been attacked brutally by the Turkish government with military after the war in Kurdistan has restarted in summer 2015. Although part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Diyarbakir the state destroyed systematically half of Sur, 23.000 people have been displaced and a culture of thousands of years eliminated.

Over 120,000 petition development banks to Save the Blue Heart of Europe and drop destructive hydropower in the Balkans

21 june 2018

London, Prague, Radolfzell, Vienna – Representatives from the Save the Blue Heart of Europe campaign to save Europe’s last remaining wild rivers handed in a petition endorsed globally by more than 120,000 people, calling on international development banks to rein in financial support for hydropower projects in the Balkans.

Delivered to the London headquarters of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the petition targets the funding of the EBRD, the World Bank and the EU’s European Investment Bank, which together have funded at least 82 hydropower plants across the Balkans – of which 37 are located in protected areas – with EUR 727 million in total investments.

Rethinking Climate Politics in the Vernacular: The Water Paradigm and a new way forward

Given the impasse in climate politics, maybe it is time to reframe the problem and start again. One way of doing this is to focus on how global warming is tied into our habitual abuse of water. In fact, it can be argued that climate change will never be rolled back unless the crucial link between local and global water cycles is restored.

People all over the world are coming to an ecocentric awareness of the integral dynamics of water—in human bodies, in plants, in soils, and as an agent of Earth cooling. Grassroots movements are demanding re-municipalisation, although a socialist solution of public ownership is only half the story, because it remains anthropocentric. Alternative philosophies of water are coming from Indigenous peoples, ecological feminists, even unconventional lawyers and engineers. These visions replace the mindset of water extractivism with water commoning. The Water Paradigm overtakes both corporate water marketing and state-managed technological fixes. Key priorities are self-reliance with water for food sovereignty and re-skilling with hands-on care of bioregional catchments.

Here is a synergistic politics that can be at once post-patriarchal, post-capitalist, postcolonial and ecocentric. How so? A good part of the answer lies in uncovering a set of premises that are basic to all four of these movement struggles.

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