Portugal invested around 13,000 million euros in the water sector during the last 25 years to improve its quality, highlighted today the Secretary of State for the Environment and Energy, João Galamba.
In Arganil, in the Coimbra district, during the inauguration of three municipal water supply subsystems, the official highlighted that only the Operational Program for Sustainability and Efficiency in the Use of Resources (POSEUR) mobilized 560 million European funds to finance 940 operations throughout the country.
“This investment will continue in the future and, within the framework of community support until 2027, investments in water supply and sanitation will continue,” guaranteed João Galamba, noting that, in recent decades, the reform of the sector was “structured based on strategies sequential plans. ”.
The Secretary of State for the Environment and Energy has also revealed that the Government is finalizing the Strategic Plan for the Supply of Wastewater and Stormwater for 2030“which aims to guarantee excellent water services for all and with certain accounts”.
Water and its management require “a clear political agenda, when studies point to a scenario of scarcityof reduced rainfall and increasingly frequent and intense periods of extreme drought.
Stressing that rainfall has decreased by around 15% in the last 20 years, João Galamba indicated that the most recent studies point to a greater reduction by the end of the century, between 10 and 25%.
Despite the current situation of extreme drought in Portugal, which is experiencing the second driest year since 1931, the Secretary of State for the Environment and Energy has ruled out, for the time being, a scenario of rationing human water consumption, although it has called for savings in non-priority consumption that must be reduced.
The governor inaugurated this Friday the rehabilitation of three of the five water supply subsystems of the municipality of Arganil (Vila Cova de Alva, Alqueve and Pomares), which involved an investment of 3.4 million euros by the company Águas do Centro Litoral (AdCL).
Inserted in the Multimunicipal Water Supply and Sanitation System of AdCL, the three infrastructures will allow supplying in greater quantity and quality to the more than 4,000 inhabitants of said parishes in the municipality of Arganil.
At the event, the mayor of Arganil recalled that the inaugurated investments are the “the culmination of a contracted process in 2004“, with the then Águas do Mondego, current AdCL, whose interventions should have concluded in 2008.
According to Luís Paulo Costa, the great delay was due to “to the great complexity“of aqueducts and sewers”, which is not alien to the “demanding” orography of the municipality, the dispersion in 180 hamlets, in 332 square kilometers of the municipal territory.
“This complexity is not unrelated to the fact that many of the towns are very far from each other and have very few inhabitants”, said the mayor, also highlighting that “demanding circumstances” of the municipality determined that there are about 60 autonomous catchment subsystems.
Of those 60, only five are integrated into the AdCL multi-municipal system, since the remaining 55, of small capacity, were not large enough to be added and managed by that company, which, according to Luís Paulo Costa, made access to community financing non-viable
The mayor highlighted that, in the last five years, AdCL and the municipality of Arganil invested more than 12 million euros in the rehabilitation and expansion of sanitation systemswater supply and improvement of solid waste management in the municipality.
AdCL’s multi-municipal system covers 30 municipalities in the districts of Aveiro, Coimbra and Leiria and a population of around 1.1 million inhabitants.
Source: Observadora
