Half of the urban area of Dénia could be flooded before 2050
The Department of Climate Emergency and Ecological Transition, represented by Mireia Mollà, has presented this week a visual tool which defines the behavior of the coastal strip of the Valencian Community, through predictive scenarios in the year 2050 and 2100 based on greenhouse emissions.
The minister Mireia Mollà has indicated in her speech that the objective of the viewer is to encourage the administrations with competences on the coast to "adopt courageous measures and strategies that minimize the effects of climate change on the natural environment and the safety of people".
The devastating situation of Dénia in the coming decades
The viewer, which has been made based on the parameters used by the UN panel of experts on climate change applied to the Valencian coast, already shows preliminary results of instability aggravated by the increasingly recurrent and virulent extreme meteorological phenomena.
One of the points with the greatest climatic pressure is the Marina Alta, with the capital, Dénia, taking the worst part due to its geography. In fact, according to this open consultation instrument, the municipality will suffer in a little more than a couple of decades, with an average probability, episodes of flooding that will leave a multitude of neighborhoods in the urban area under water, such as Baix la Mar, all the area of Miguel Hernández, Patricio Ferrándiz, Saladar, Marquesado and Joan Fuster.
The Les Marines area will also suffer from these floods, flooding most of the land between the Camí de Gandia and what is now the seashore.
How will the retreat of the coast affect our city?
In fact, in the worst case scenario, a sea level rise of more than half a meter is expected in Dénia between now and the end of the century. This scenario, the most pessimistic, predicts a disappearance of what are now our beaches by 2100 due to the retreat of the coast. In addition, in Les Marines it will affect the urbanizations and houses located on the beachfront, completely disappearing the entire urbanized area of Les Deveses between the Les Marines road and the current shore.
Half of the Dianense population (21.841 people, to be exact) will be affected by these floods and by the rise in sea level.
A wake-up call to promote effective policies
Mollà, in an event that had the participation of the regional secretary, Paula Tuzón, and the general director of Climate Change, Celsa Monrós, said that this tool allows the design of "adaptation, mitigation plans and, in some cases, of withdrawal of points that in these future scenarios announce great vulnerability ".
"The best indicator that the modeling works is that the effects it predicts are already being fulfilled," said the minister. This is the case, for example, of the erosive trend on the beaches in the center of the province of Valencia; El Saler and Pinedo already show a setback of between 30 and 60 meters in the last decade.
"There are no simple or unique solutions. We have a complex governance system that should help administrations to activate formulas for protection, accommodation or even the withdrawal of construction projects," said Monrós.
In this sense, Mireia Mollà has stressed that maintaining some designs is "unsustainable" and that the withdrawal "forces us to make a brave exercise to abandon today's projects, whether planned or futureable".
He has also appealed to the responsibility of human activity in the climate emergency that must now be accompanied by "the joint ability to reverse the climate change situation for greater collective action."
This tool was created with the intention of joining other plans such as the new Climate Change and Ecological Transition Law, the Valencian Climate Change and Energy Strategy or the Valencian Energy and Climate Plan.
The person in charge of Ecological Transition in the Generalitat Valenciana has remarked that acting in adaptation and mitigation of climate change is to guarantee economic activity, environmental protection, social welfare and security. He concluded his speech with a message for the town councils of the coastal municipalities: "It is an essential tool and we want to help you along this path with our strategies and skills."