Portugal has invested 13 thousand ME in the water sector in the last 25 years, says Government – Observer
Portugal invested around €13 billion in the water sector In the last 25 years to improve quality, highlighted today the Secretary of State for the Environment and Energy, João Galamba.
In Arganil, in the district of Coimbra, during the inauguration of three water supply subsystems to the municipality, the official stressed that only the Operational Program for Sustainability and Efficiency in the Use of Resources (POSEUR) mobilized 560 million European funds to finance 940 operations across the country.
“This investment in future planning2 and not insurance of support and maintenance in continuity”, João Galamba, improving that, in the last decades, the base of the strategic sector, based on strategic plans ”.
The Secretary of State for the Environment and Energy also revealed that the Government is finalizing the Strategic Plan for the Supply of Wastewater and Stormwater by 2030“which aims to ensure excellent water services for everyone and with correct accounts”.
Water and its management require “a clear political agenda, Studies point to a scenario of destructionof reduced rainfall and increasingly frequent and intense periods of extreme drought”.
João Galamba indicated for another final reduction of the years, between 15%, the most recent studies.
Despite the current situation of drought in Portugal, which has been experiencing or drier extreme drought since 1931, the Secretary of State for the Environment and Energy, adjusted for now, a scenario of second need for human water consumption, although he appeals to its economy of water 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 represents 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, as infrastructures they will allow supplying more than 4,000 inhabitants in those parishes in the municipality of Arganil in greater quantity and higher quality.
At the ceremony, the mayor of Arganil recalled that the investments that were inaugurated are the “the culmination of a process contracted in 2004“, with Águas do Mondego, currently AdCL, whose interventions were completed by 2008.
According to Luís Paulo Costa, the great delay was due to “to the great complexity” of water supply systems and wastewater systems”, which is not unrelated to the “demanding” orography of the municipality, the dispersion in 180 villages, in 332 square kilometers of the municipal territory.
“This complexity is not unrelated to a circumstance that a good part of the villages are very distant and with very few distant”, said the mayor, also stressing that “as demanding circumstances” of the county determined that there were about 60 autonomous subsystems of capture.
Of these 60, five integrated into AdCL’s unique multis, the remaining 55, of capacity, were large enough to be aggregated and are no longer designed by that company, the second Luís Paulo Costa, made access to exclusive financing unfeasible.
The mayor highlighted that, in the last five years, AdCL and the municipality of Arganil invested more than euros in the rehabilitation and 12 million 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.