Faced with liberal democracies besieged from within and without by the shockwaves of Trumpism, the undeniable evidence of the climate crisis—and climate denial—and growing inequalities with housing as the primary cause, the ARA gave voice for two days to the Enfoquem solutions forum, held by the CCCB. We detail 15 solutions across the three areas.

Is it truly a unique bird in the world? Is it bred at the North Pole? Does it grow up in nests high in the trees? Or is it a laboratory creature that doesn't even have any feathers? All sorts of legends have surrounded one of the most ubiquitous dishes on Brazilian Christmas tables for the past 30 years. There, many have heard stories about the origin of this super-chicken, the Chester, always shrouded in mystery that has given rise to the most outlandish theories (like the one about the beast without any feathers). Few can claim to have ever seen a live specimen, and that's why, when journalist Vitor Hugo Brandalise Junior, sitting among friends in a bar, blurts out, "My uncle was one of the inventors of the Chester," he knows he'll have the audience's full attention.

Overwhelmed, pressured, and facing costs that threaten to overwhelm them. This is the current situation in Catalonia for many organizations and companies, many in the third sector, dedicated to the selective collection and sorting of clothing and textiles deposited in designated containers for reuse. The sector is facing a twofold problem: on the one hand, a massive and ever-increasing volume of clothing and textiles complicates management at facilities across the country. On the other hand, there is the glut of secondhand clothing in international markets, where the sorted materials used to find a market. If they cannot sell, the management costs become unsustainable for these social enterprises.

When the ARA was founded in late 2011 with the promise of seeking out—and reporting on—"the world to come," the country barely reached 7.5 million inhabitants. The goal of 8 million was envisioned on the still distant horizon of 2030, but reality has defied predictions, and the figure has been reached much sooner than expected, specifically seven years ahead of schedule—at the end of 2023. The explanation for what demographers have already dubbed as the second population boom of the 21st century —and we're barely past the first quarter— is primarily due to the arrival of foreign residents. Without this factor, the country would have been losing its total population for almost eight years. In fact, Catalonia's natural growth rate, that is, the difference between births and deaths, has been slowing down over the last fifteen years, even entering negative territory in the last seven. Since 2018, there have been more burials than deaths.

The residents of Roses have gone 24 hours without using their tap water normally. If they want to drink it or use it to prepare food, they must first boil it. This is what the City Council has recommended after detecting a large amount of organic matter. The council emphasizes that the contamination detected does not pose an immediate "danger" to people's health, but asks that the instructions provided by the Department of Health be followed as a precaution. The situation, however, could last a few weeks.

Catalonia has gained 700,000 inhabitants in the last 10 years, between 2014 and 2024. It's as if the entire Baix Llobregat region had doubled in size and spread across a few, very specific areas of the territory. According to the experts consulted, this is a boom. The largest population since the end of the economic crisis and the second major growth peak of the 21st century. Last November, the number of inhabitants surpassed 8 million, but how have they been distributed within Catalonia? And what are the factors that generate these internal and external movements of inhabitants? At ARA, we have analyzed, municipality by municipality, the evolution of the population over the last 10 years to see how towns and cities are absorbing this increase, the migratory changes, and what impact this has on the most basic facilities and services, such as schools, healthcare centers, nursing homes, mobility, and, of course, housing.

The Civil Guard report unravels a series of audio recordings extracted from Koldo García's cell phone, revealing the conspiracy of three PSOE leaders—Koldo himself, José Luis Ábalos, and Santos Cerdán—to allegedly manipulate public contracts and collect illegal commissions from companies. ARA has had access to these recordings, which were held by the UCO (University of Cordoba), and we explain the most relevant details below.

Laia de Nadal (Barcelona, ​​​​1972) has been president of the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP) since the beginning of the year. She has been rector of Pompeu Fabra University for almost two years. As a professor of medicine and life sciences, she co-directed the Cell Signaling Research Group, affiliated with the Barcelona Biomedical Research Institute.

Commissioner Eduard Sallent is the number 2 within the Catalan police, known as the Mossos d'Esquadra, serving under Josep Maria Estela. Sallent worked in the intelligence department five years ago, so we ask him to look back on that fateful August 17, what we learnt and how anti-terrorist surveillance is carried out now in Catalonia.

Adding the blue crab to rice, fish broths and other culinary recipes has helped combat the plague that threatens the ecosystems in the Ebro Delta. The years-long war against this crustacean fishermen have been waging may have found a new ally. Tests carried out by researchers at the Institut de Recerca i Tecnologia Agroaliamentàries (IRTA) have shown that octopuses are natural predators of the blue crab, which they are capable of eating in large quantities if necessary: "A single octopus can eat up to 33% of its weight in crab meat in a single day", explains project coordinator Patrícia Prado.

Catalonia's High Court ruling against Barcelona's low-emissions zone (LEZ) have caused surprise and incomprehension, and not only in the administration, which is already working on an appeal. Since hundreds of cities across Europe have implemented similar measures to combat pollution, some a decade before the Catalan capital, how is it possible that a court decision urges the measure to be overturned and not only, in any case, to amend some of its parts? This is what air quality experts, scientists and citizens' organisations consulted by ARA had to say, going over main points of a resolution which they criticise for overlooking the right to health and containing "technical errors".

Catalonia's High Court has annulled Barcelona's low emission zone (ZBE) "for lack of reports" supporting some of the restrictions and an excessive "geographical scope of implementation" and of affected vehicles. According to the court, the regulation does not sufficiently analyse the alternatives or the economic, social and market and competition consequences these measures may have, nor does it sufficiently assess the costs and benefits that rolling out the project imply for the population and the administration itself. "The need for municipal intervention to improve air quality is not in any way questioned, but rather whether the limiting measures adopted are proportionate in this case," the court rules. The judgment, motivated by appeals filed by several associations, is not final and the municipal government can lodge an appeal.

The veto on the most polluting cars in urban areas is to be extended (and fairly quickly) in the next few years to a large part of the Catalan municipalities. Towns with over 20,000 inhabitants will have to have a low-emission zone by 2025 to improve the quality of the air citizens breathe. The details, i.e., the minimum requirements that the zone will have to meet, will soon be unified by the Catalan Government, but the commitment to deploying them was sealed this morning by 65 municipalities out of the 67 with over 20,000 inhabitants (Esplugues de Llobregat and Sant Pere de Ribes have stayed out, for the moment) under the agreement to improve air quality in Catalonia. The affected municipalities have a total of 5,450,662 inhabitants.

The discomfort of the educational community with the department has escalated rapidly since the announcement last week of the changes in the school calendar. The decision that the next school year will start a week earlier and with an intensive school day throughout September without any previous debate has caused the teachers' unions to explode, and this Thursday they have occupied the headquarters of the Department of Education and threaten to stay until the consellerjosep Gonzalez-Cambray, receives them and commits to reverse the changes. Shouting "Cambray, resign", the unions criticize "the opacity" of the Govern and, beyond the discrepancies with the measure, they are annoyed by how and when the measure has been announced, skipping the participation bodies such as Catalonia's School Council.

The noise of parrots is no longer strange or exotic-sounding in the most populated areas of Catalonia, although 40 years ago they were an anecdote in the midst of the usual sparrows or serins. The list of newly arrived birds in the last decades is quite long –there are 17– and exotic birds have had a lot to do with it because they make up to half of the novelties detected by the third Atlas of nesting birds in Catalonia, a project led by the Institut Català d'Ornitologia (ICO), which is the most comprehensive study ever made of the birds that inhabit Catalonia. In view of the overall numbers, things have not gone badly for birds: it is estimated that between 8 and 12 million pairs of birds breed each year and the 233 species that can be found in some corner of the country are a very broad representation (39%) of Europe's bird wildlife.

A year ago came the ultimatum from Europe for Spain to curb water pollution caused by nitrates from intensive livestock farming and agriculture. The excessively lukewarm reaction when applying palliative measures in some areas has led the European Commission (EC) to go a step further and take the serious problem of slurry to court. Spain will have to respond to the Court of Justice of the EU for non-compliance with the EU directive: "The efforts of the Spanish authorities have been insufficient and unsatisfactory," says the EC in a statement.

Showing a covid pass will no longer be compulsory to enter bars, restaurants, gyms and visit nursing homes. Only a few hours after it came into force, the Health Department has decided to temporarily suspend the new requirement due to technical issues that prevented users from downloading the document on the La Meva Salut website. In an urgent statement, the department has put the decision on hold until the trouble with the website is solved. Tens of thousands of citizens joined the virtual queue for the website, leading to long waiting times. The covid pass thus remains a requirement to access to nightclubs (it already was since October) and to travel within the EU. A new assessment of the situation will be made on Friday and a new date for the measure to come into force will be set.

If there is somewhere close where we can already see the effects of the climate crisis it is the Ebro delta. It is like watching the sea level rise at an accelerated rate, not because the water is rising more than in other coastal areas, but because, in parallel, the Delta is sinking (due to the phenomenon known as subsidence) and the coastline is retreating due to the lack of sediments that reach it. "In the Delta we are experiencing what our beaches will suffer in 2050 or 2070, and this makes it an excellent natural laboratory in which to test solutions," explains UPC professor and director of the Maritime Engineering Laboratory, Agustín Sánchez-Arcilla.

The acceleration Catalonia needs in the implementation of renewable energy will require more dialogue and prior negotiation between developers and landowners where they want to locate wind farms and photovoltaic parks. Local councils will also have a greater say than they up until now, and both public and local entities will have the opportunity to participate, if they so wish, in a project that is proposed in their municipality or county. All this is included in the Catalan Government amended renewable energy decree, which it hopes to get approved next Tuesday.

More than 25,500 livestock farms and 62.5 million head of cattle. With this census, Catalonia is one of the driving forces of the livestock sector in Spain, with a predominance of the intensive model of large farms over extensive farms (with lower livestock density). The downside of this activity is that it has in turn placed the country as one of the territories of the State with the most contaminated groundwater by nitrates associated with slurry: 40% of the area is already affected within what are called nitrate vulnerable zones. To reverse the situation, and dodge a possible EU record, the Generalitat issued a moratorium three years ago limiting the growth of farms in more than 60 municipalities, a measure that has now been extended for four years. However, for the moment, the results have not helped to make the pollution go away, according to Greenpeace in a report published on Thursday. Nitrate vulnerable areas have grown by 200,000 hectares in the last decade and pollution has shot up 45% between 2016 and 2019.