Spain’s environmental minister Teresa Ribera—who on Tuesday faced a parliamentary hearing for her nomination as the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for the Clean, Just and Competitive Transition—blocked an infrastructure project that would have helped prevent the recent catastrophic flooding in Valencia that claimed more than 200 lives and destroyed entire towns, Spanish media reports.
Projects to channel two of the ravines that overflowed during the historic storm last month had been initially approved in 2009. Ribera herself had given it a favorable environmental evaluation in 2011 when she was a secretary for the ministry. However, the construction was continually sidelined by successive governments despite being rated as a priority by the regional water confederation.
The body responsible for evaluating and preventing flood risks had not changed its assessment when Ribera, now head of the environmental ministry, finally shut down the project in 2021 based on new cost-benefit criteria and new environmental standards. Under the new vision, the project was deemed too expensive for the benefit it would provide and too interventionist in its environmental impact assessment.
This final decision was made during a meeting regarding the Flood Risk Management Plans (PGRI) on September 16, 2021. At the presentation, the then-president of the hydrographic region for the project, Miguel Polo, and the national hydrographics director Teodoro Estrela both defended the necessity of infrastructure and called for its revaluation. They both answered directly to Ribera.
The project was budgeted at 250 million euros. Experts estimate that reconstruction of the infrastructure destroyed by the floods will far exceed two billion euros. The lives lost will never be recovered.
