Silent destruction: five threatened landscapes in Portugal | climatic climate
How urgent is the urgent? They have been alerting us to the crisis of change for some years now, they have told us about irreversible environmental catastrophes. It is not the easy exercise of measuring urgency when, all around us, we eat more or less the same landscapes. This is one of the challenges of environmental communication: we are almost always the heralds of a “silent destruction”, as defined by Paulo Lucas, a member of the board of the Zero association. We publish solid credibles, we give space for arguments, we report data as an inauspicious future, but we cannot photograph as ruins of the future.
“These are silent changes in the landscape, barely visible. Things happen right now, but we don’t realize it. Only when there is a big storm or an ocean overtopping do these events make us react. The human being is very reactive, he is not preventive and does not anticipate much. The human being is an animal – animals also do not have this perspective of thinking too much about the future, they manage things on a day-to-day basis, today there is food and tomorrow there is no food. This is a bit of our origin. But we have to question our survival while species if we want to stay here, he says”, environmentalist Paulo Lucas.
With the help of Paulo Lucas, we selected five images of threatened Portuguese landscapes. From the humid mountains of Gerês to the barrier islands in the Ria Formosa, in the Algarve, there are several panoramas in the country that we take for granted. They are natural settings that comfort us seen since childhood and that, we feel. They are not. “What is happening [em termos climáticos] it’s so overwhelming that people can’t even react to it. They are happening slowly, but they are happening: a silent destruction”, warns the environmentalist.
1. Barrier Islands in the Ria Formosa (Algarve)
This system consisting of five islands and two peninsulas, in the Ria Formosa, in the Algarve, is very vulnerable to rising from the sea and ocean storms. Events powered by climate changes, such as rising sea levels and intensifying violent storms, threaten these islands, including Tavira and Cacela, at risk. The islands of Ria Formosa are Classified as protected by the Natural Park statute, dated 1987, and integrated by the Natura 2000 Network.
2. Cork oak and holm oak (Alentejo)
Like many significant changes in holm oaks, because they are dependent on a certain amount of rain. If like North American rains, holm oaks “hold the conditions for survival survive” and perhaps become more and more viable for. “The cork oak ends up suffering stress water and may disappear. This is already more or less stipulated that it can happen. This mosaic that we have today will be profoundly affected by climate change”, says Paulo Lucas. In 2001, the legal framework was created that establish as protective measures for cork oak and holm oak.
3. Poço das Rãs bogs, in Gerês (Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro)
The wetter mountain areas can also suffer “immensely” with the increase in rainfall. Today colorful, lush bogs would even have water, which is to say less life. The one shown in the image was recorded a few weeks ago by the PUBLIC in Poço das Rãs, in the parish of Covelães, in the municipality of Montalegre, on a fringe of the Peneda Gerês National Park (one first protected area created in Portugalbeing the only one with the status of National Park).
“Peat bogs are resilient, but less and less resilient conditions,” predicts Paulo Lucas. Other mountain habitats will undergo changes, many of them unpredictable. “What will Serra da Estrela be like with the climate changes in the landscape? I don’t know. It is an area adapted to dry and snowy conditions in winter, but what kinds of species will disappear? We don’t know,” he says.
4. Ribeira do Vascão
If a situation of prolonged or prolonged drought or a brutal summer with no occurrence of species for months – and as these intense years indicate will be more and more frequent – Portugal could witness a place of extinction of species in the interval of a place of species in the range. “In winter there is a lot of water, but then in summer the fish are confined to the catches, which also run the risk of drying up. If these accumulations of river water disappear, species will also disappear and this has a great impact on biological diversity. This can happen in a situation of very serious drought”, says Paulo Lucas. One of the fish at risk is the saramugo (anaecypris hispanic), one of the most threatening freshwater fish species in our country and in the Iberian Peninsula and which is still present in the Ribeira do Vascão, a tributary on the right bank of the Guadiana which, for most of its course, forms a natural border between the Alentejo and Algarve. The Vascão stream is located in the Vale do Guadiana Natural Park, created in 1995.
5. Rice fields in Comporta (Lisbon and Tagus Valley)
The agriculture that is carried out in the continuity of the estuaries, often below sea level – as is the case of the rice fields in the Sado estuary, on the Comporta peninsula – is also a threatened Portuguese landscape. “Saline intrusion is going to end this type of cultivation sooner or later. There are areas that are already being abandoned. There are always inclusive areas that today are no longer productive due to salt”, says Paulo Lucas. the rice paddies to integrate the Sado Estuary Natural Reserve and the Natura 2000 Network.