Storms and a lack of planning are pushing Catalan beaches to the brink.

BarcelonaWhat will the beaches of the future be like? More importantly, will there be beaches at all? With these two powerful reflections, the Catalan Infrastructure Advisory Council (CAdIC) wanted to put on the table this Wednesday the "urgent" need to plan the management of sand on the Catalan coast to prevent beaches from disappearing.

The storms from the east, the danas or cold drops –which are increasingly intense– and climate change, which is taking away beach space, are changing the morphology of Catalan beaches at a pace that is difficult to counter. And bureaucracy and the fact that these issues are shared (the State manages the sand, the Generalitat manages territorial planning, and the municipalities manage urban planning) have further complicated decision-making to alleviate this deterioration of the coastline.

Thus, experts and institutional representatives from the local community and the Generalitat met this Wednesday at the Palau Macaya in Barcelona to analyze the challenges and make proposals to guarantee the sustainability of the Catalan coast. Ramon Arandes, a civil engineer and member of the CAdIC (Central Council of Catalonia), opened the event with the presentation of a compelling report that warns that "the lack of comprehensive and coordinated sand management can lead to the progressive and irreversible degradation of Catalan beaches."

According to Arandes, "the problem is not the presence of ports, but the lack of sediment input and the lack of efficient planning." Therefore, she asserts, it is necessary to act with scientific and technical rigor. The document includes up to 10 key proposals to improve coastal management, and specifically sand management, highlighting the need to integrate port dredging into comprehensive planning and to reduce administrative procedures and times to remove sand retained in ports. In fact, the advisory council directly calls on public administrations "to take an active role in defining a long-term coastal strategy, equipped with resources and technical planning."

During the roundtable discussion, Margarita Díez, director of the Port Area of the Ports Center of the Generalitat (Catalan Government), explained that "reaching a consensus to plan the uses of a port, for example, can be extremely complex." "Sometimes a suit is so tailor-made that when it changes even a little, it's no longer valid. And that, in infrastructure projects that are designed 30 years in the future, is a problem, because it restricts us and causes us to lose many opportunities," he stated. The time it takes to reach agreements and launch projects is also, according to Díez, excessively long.

At the discussion, various experts agreed that more coordination is needed and that, indeed, the future of the beaches as we know them is in doubt, but not everyone shares this negative view. "Without the breakwaters, Sitges would no longer have beaches, and without the port, Mataró wouldn't either," Arandes recalled at the start of the event. And the Generalitat's Director General for Coastal Policies, Kiryat Mercado, has given some figures: "There are beaches that, in the last five years, have lost 74% of their surface area, with all that this entails both for citizens and for the precious ecosystem that beaches represent and as a protection zone for many."

In this sense, the most forceful has been the coastal expert and Councilor for Urban Ecology of Calafell, Aron Marcos: "We must think about which beaches we can maintain and which ones we cannot. We have challenges such as rising sea levels and we will have to see which ones we can maintain, how, how much it will cost and who will pay for it."

Mercado, on the other hand, is not so pessimistic and has explained that the Government is already working on reports and plans to help municipalities maintain their beaches. "We are preparing reports that will contain five or six measures that municipalities can implement to ensure the good condition of their beaches. These will be customized measures for each case, because what may work for one beach may not work for another," explained the head of Coastal Policies. "We are trying to speed up the bureaucracy with the State and shorten deadlines," Mercado insisted.

And from beach sand to river sand. The manager of the Aggregates Guild, Jaume Puig, opened one last debate. Is it necessary or not to clean riverbeds? Puig recalled that it is a practice that is avoided, as is "touching" the sand on beaches, but that "it should be reviewed because if the accumulated sand and sediment cannot be removed from the rivers, the water is diverted to other places," he noted. Puig also explained that several diving companies have told the industry that the level of underwater sand is also rising "because the beach, naturally, lacks the capacity to move the sand to the shore," and this is causing many ecosystems to be buried under tons of sand over the last decade. "Unfortunately, we can't go against nature, but we will make every effort, with breakwaters, dunes, and whatever else is necessary, to avoid sacrificing any beach," Mercado concluded.