Legal wrangling over the need – or otherwise – to build a brand new super port at Granadilla on the southern coast of Tenerife should give us pause to think about the cost of such developments.
The bill for this one, vital to ease congestion at Santa Cruz, according to its developers, is said to in the region of £330m ($476m) – hard currency in today’s prices.
But although that’s a lot of finance, even in a world rapidly getting used to talking about dizzyingly large sums of money, is that all it’s going to cost? Not according to Spanish environmentalist group Ben Magec. The group is up in arms over its government’s decision to re-write the rules by de-classifying beds of a marine grass called Cymodea Nodosa, removing their right to environmental protection and allowing the port development to proceed.
Not good enough, says the Spanish Supreme Court, berating government officials for disregarding their own officials who advise against declassification, and handing down an injunction to stop work at Granadilla almost as quickly as it started.
Equally exercised by the Supreme Court decision, the port authority and the regional government for the Canary Islands plan to appeal against it. If they win, the grass gets the chop and the port goes ahead. Unless Ben Magec finds a way to counter-appeal.
But hang on; what about the underwater grass, the wildlife it supports, and the economies that rely on it? Aren’t they important too?
Cut to North America’s western seaboard, where the State of Washington recognises the important of its own underwater grasses. They’ve been increasingly protective of this marine habitat since the 1980s, recognising that it performs a key role in providing a home for fish and shellfish that support a multi-million dollar industry – and that’s just in Washington State.
They’re planting some to replace the 90% that’s been lost to dredging, propeller scouring and loss of light caused by algal growth stimulated by nutrient pollution over the last 70 years or so. They hope it might help to reverse the decline in the populations of cod, shellfish and scallops, which conventional wisdom says have been harmed by its loss.
So if such loss continues, then aren’t we in danger of having these projects cost the Earth – quite literally, rather than simply the numbers on the bottom of the balance sheet?
What’s to be done? What’s the compromise? Where is the pragmatic solution? It’s no good saying one can’t be found, because history proves that it can, the present suggests it ought to be, and the future suggests it’s vital.
In Britain, ABP have created new habitat on the Humber to replace some that its developments there had destroyed. On a more complicated basis, the Norwegians have spent the last seven years working towards their country’s stated aim of cleaning up port pollution.
Their legislation starts from a perfectly reasonable assumption – the polluter should pay. But it simply isn’t that simple. The identity of a polluter might not easily be established, or there might be multiple polluters. Equally, there might be a primary polluter, who discharged a pollutant into the port, and numerous secondary ones, such as the owners or master of every vessel whose propellers churned it up and moved it about. And what if polluters no longer exist?
Applying legislation and thorny issues surrounding it to the situation on the ground in Oslo, all of the parties have got together to address the spirit, rather than the letter, of the law when it comes to paying the clean-up bill. Despite efforts to apply the principle of the polluter paying, they’ve found that the costs are better covered by interested parties ‘going Dutch’. This means that developers, the City of Oslo, the Port and the Government are all chipping in.
The result is that the port gets cleaned up without recourse to inordinately long legal battles. As Dag Erland Henriksen and Tonje Pareli Gormley say in a paper posted on the International Law Office web site: “As the campaign continues, it is expected that local authorities and local polluters in other ports might want to apply a similar pragmatic approach. Otherwise, it is feared that these issues will be debated in the courts for quite some time.” The result? A cleaner port, faster.
Back in America the same principle is being applied in Washington’s Puget Sound. Governor Chris Gregoire has made it a state priority to engage citizens, community organisations, native tribes and government at every level in restoring Puget Sound and Hood Canal to a healthy condition by 2020. She says: “Puget Sound is a treasure for all Washingtonians. We need to ensure that we can continue to swim in it, fish in it and dig in it for future generations.”
As a result of her initiative the Washington Department of Ecology is working with the tiny Port of Anacortes, which exports forest products and petroleum coke, on a Puget Sound clean-up project. Also involved are Texaco and Shell, the local authority and the Washington Department of Natural Resources. Cleaning up almost 50,000 tonnes of contaminated soil and sediments, they all believe, will underwrite the future success of the Washington economy.
Some of the work is complete, some is expected to start within months, and some later next year or the year after – but all are starting sooner than they might otherwise have done of the courts were involved. Says Sandra Caldwell of the Washington Department of Ecology: “Cleanup allows economic development, public access recreation and other important uses. A health environment is crucial for Washington’s economy.”
Let’s cut back to Tenerife. There is congestion in Santa Cruz. Perhaps Granadilla is the answer; perhaps it’s not; we wouldn’t like to say. But what is important is that, like Oslo and Puget Sound, ports start to recognise the need for a pragmatic approach to help them to steer a safe course through difficult waters.
Therefore, since the Cymodea Nodosa exists in the water around Tenerife today, why shouldn’t it exist there ten or twenty years from now? Shouldn’t this and every future port be predicated on an honest recognition by everyone that we all have to survive, and that any environmental impact should be as negligible as possible – without the need for recourse to the courts? After all, ‘The Earth’ is far too high a price, and neither us nor future generations should be paying it.
