World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought

June 17, 2022

If, on the one hand, the Azores face flooding due to overflow and clogged rivers, on the other hand, they are also fighting drought and desertification. Both are problems related to climate change that affect countries all over the world.

Today we celebrate World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, intending to raise awareness of international efforts to counteract land degradation through scientific cooperation tools, problem-solving and the strong involvement of communities on the field.

In the Region, the Regional Secretariat for the Environment and Climate Change, through the Regional Directorate for Spatial Planning and Water Resources, determined the preparation of a guiding document aimed at greater territorial resilience to drought and water scarcity events, the Azores Drought and Water Scarcity Management Plan (PSE-A - Plano de Gestão de Secas e Escassez de Água dos Açores).

This plan seeks to respond to the need to adapt to climate change, in particular by recognising the potential for periods of drought and water scarcity in the Azores to worsen and, as such, to prepare the regional territory to respond in an organised manner to future occurrences.

Being a plan of regional scope, the PSE-A establishes contingency levels adapted to the regional reality and identifies a set of adaptation and preparation/prevention measures, which shall be detailed and operationalized at the scale of each supply system by the respective management entities, thus materializing the measures provided for in the Regional Plan for Climate Change (RH18) and the Management Plan for the Azores Hydrographic Region (RH9_S_053.A).

In such a critical and fundamental issue in the current and future context for the Region, the success and fulfilment of the strategy that will be defined for drought and scarcity management at a regional level, and given the need to comply with obligations determined in the PSE-A, will depend essentially on access to funding in support programs associated with adaptation and resilience to climate change, such as the LIFE IP CLIMAZ project.