The rain's in Spain: but don't forget the drought

As the Spaniards found out this year, lack of water is terrifying. But as soon as it rains, we act as though nothing happened

Peter Preston
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday August 20 2008 12:00 BST

The difficulty with droughts is that they can turn to floods overnight. The difficulty with rain, or acute lack of it, when tied into the prophesies of global warming, is that the short-term can turn from arid to soggy in a trice. Which is part, but not all, of the Spanish story.
Remember Britain in the summer of 2006? It was hot and dry, after a dry winter and dry spring – and the water began to run out. The spectre of standpipes stalked the streets of the south again. Thames Water, as usual, took a mighty leakage drubbing: and we were copiously advised that there would be worse to come as climates inexorably changed. But then 2007 was a sodden ordeal and the aquifers filled up again. Now, in 2008, we're wailing about the lousiest August any of us can remember.
Now turn to Catalonia this spring. There'd been precious little snow on the Pyrenees, so rivers like the Ter were low. When I went to see my Spanish grandchildren near La Bisbal, the river bed was absolutely dry. In Barcelona the mayor was signalling water rationing and calling for tankers to bring relief into port. It couldn't have looked more threatening. And then it rained.
Now the apples are ripening in the Baix Emporda and the yellow fields of sunflowers stretch endlessly. The Ter is half full, the land is surprisingly green, the champion golf courses lush and tended. All it takes is a couple of weeks of downpours to move us from crisis to complacency. But complacency, here, is a fatal state of mind.
Catalonia, with its high plateaux and mountain ranges, ought to be one of the wetter regions of Spain (as well as the richest). Andalucia ought to be one of the driest, most over-populated and over-farmed regions: and is. Andalucia is concrete and tourists and fruit and poverty. It has plunged, often heedlessly, into acute water shortage. But when water and regionalism and politics mix, everything grows toxic. Now Catalonia, which might have helped send water to the arid south, knows it has problems of its own. The rest of Spain, some of it wet like Galicia, some of it desert like the area just north of Almeria, knows that water is a most vital resource. Watch that factor into the separatist pressures in Catalonia, the Basque country and (more mildly) in Galicia. Watch water put more acute strain on the Spanish state.
In Britain, we said two years ago, there should be a national grid, moving water from the wet north-west to the dry south-east. But that is damnable expensive, slow to build – and easy to deride if you're laying it whilst the rain pours down. (Cue Daily Mail editorial). And Spain is in much the same sort of bind – with Basque and Catalan nationalism dropped in the mix. (It's Scotland's oil and the Basque country's water!).
We should be clear that whole areas of Europe are becoming fatally dry. We should set about either limiting water use or transporting water in from wetter areas. We should be constructing the infrastructure that can cope with crisis. But then it starts raining again: then the flood alerts start, then long-term trends turn into a heavy shower, and we forget (as Catalonia has forgotten once more this summer). But at least the Spanish have water meters as standard. At least they have some control when the skies are incessantly blue. In Britain, we haven't even got that far yet. In Britain, the arguments about climate change and threat fade fast before a looming recession; and we still don't realise that life – everything that is precious – begins and ends with the need for water.