Angry farmers, worried tourism workers and unprepared politicians \u2013 Catalonia is on the frontline of a drought-stricken future <\/p>\n
Walking through Barcelona these days, you can\u2019t miss the signs and billboards picturing a red plastic bucket and the message \u201cWater doesn\u2019t fall from the sky\u201d (l\u2019aigua no cau del cel<\/a><\/em> in Catalan). The ads are part of a campaign <\/a>to get people to save water. Since the beginning of February, Barcelona and 200 other towns in Catalonia have been in an official drought emergency<\/a>. That means more than 6 million people in the region live with restrictions. Daily water usage per inhabitant is limited. Parks are unwatered, fountains are dry and showers at swimming pools and beaches are closed. Farmers can\u2019t irrigate most of their crops and must halve their water usage for livestock or face fines.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just Catalonia. The European Drought Observatory\u2019s map of current droughts<\/a> in Europe shows the entire Spanish Mediterranean coast in bad shape, with red areas indicating an alert similar to those in north Africa and Sicily. Catalonia may be going through the worst drought <\/a>on record for the area, but the southern region of Andaluc\u00eda has faced continuous drought since 2016<\/a>. Last year, Spain\u2019s droughts ranked among the 10 most costly climate disasters in the world, according to a report by Christian Aid<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mar\u00eda Ram\u00edrez is a journalist and deputy managing editor of elDiario.es, a news outlet in Spain<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Angry farmers, worried tourism workers and unprepared politicians \u2013 Catalonia is on the frontline of a drought-stricken future Walking through Barcelona these days, you can\u2019t miss the signs and billboards picturing a red plastic bucket and the message \u201cWater doesn\u2019t fall from the sky\u201d (l\u2019aigua no cau del cel in Catalan). The ads are part … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}