Portugal

As the host of the first BEACON regional workshop, Setúbal Council recently signed the mayors’ agreement, committing the municipality to reducing CO2 emissions by at least 40% by 2030. Climate change is now more than just a threat: the city has just finished the unprecedented task of dealing with the floods. With plans to expand the port in Setúbal and with some of the most polluting industries in the country, it will not be easy for the municipality to achieve the goal by switching from conventional lighting to LEDs. Setúbal’s strategy for climate and energy is on the table – …

Evgenia Emets, aged 39, grew up in Moscow and Kiev, later coming to Portugal via London, where she lived for ten years and completed her art studies. Whether by coincidence or not, in London, she met her future husband Victor from Poland and they travelled together through Portugal, visiting the solar village Tamera, in the Southern Alentejo. Shortly afterwards, they began making plans to move, their original dream being to create a community in one of the abandoned villages somewhere in Portugal. That’s how they ended up in Ericeira in October 2017. Evgenia has just completed her first 40-minute-long documentary, …

João Carmago, aged 35. lives in Lisbon. He has two daughters, a one-year-old and a four-year-old. he graduated in Zootechnical Engineering, but life surprised him with a taste for Journalism. Meanwhile, he studied Environmental Engineering for himself, which he found very stimulating intellectually. He worked for some years in this field and went to live in Mozambique. He taught in the north of the country, first at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences (Lichinga), then at the Faculty of Biology (Pemba). He returned to Portugal after two years. He felt stimulated by political citizenship and began working at the League for …

Can you get burned by walking on hot coals? You can! But whoever does get burned makes sure that it doesn’t happen very often. Firewalking, namely walking on fire or embers, has been practised for centuries by people from different cultures and ancestral traditions. In the last few decades, this practice has been gaining more and more followers, being used in personal development retreats, workshops or in companies, for the purposes of personal evolution or the achievement of goals and objectives. Kalid, the Sannyasin name of Pedro Fonseca, born and resident in Lisbon, was one of the first Portuguese to …

What did you lose and what did you gain from the fire? The Karuna Retreat Centre has been totally devastated. Basically, all the structures that existed there disappeared. The forest disappeared. I feel that a fire, when it comes in a natural way, cannot cause so much devastation. If we look 360 degrees around us, Karuna is surrounded by eucalyptus trees on all sides. We have more or less three hectares. We had cleaned everything: there were no eucalyptus, all the medronho trees had been pruned and the weeds had been cleared around them. So there was no reason for …

Let’s go on a treasure hunt. The treasure is in the forest. We know that, as the sun rises, the trees begin to do their work. They turn carbon dioxide (CO²) into oxygen, the elixir of life. First question Where is the treasure buried? Bear in mind that, in the Iberian Peninsula, 1.5 million hectares are covered in forests of eucalyptus, to be turned mainly into office paper. In Portugal, (92,000 km²) we have eucalyptus planted on one million hectares. This amounts to 10,000 km², or 12% of the national territory. To visualise what this means, imagine a line connecting …

Recently, Monchique was in the spotlight when the forest fires were being reported in the international press. The reason why these forest fires repeatedly rage across the Serra de Monchique and its neighbouring regions is closely linked to the investments of Semapa SA and its subsidiaries Navigator/Portucel and the industrial eucalyptus monoculture that is practised in an area of 2,500 km² to the North, both in Nave Redonda and São Teotónio (North-west), as well as in São Marcos da Serra (North-east). The main responsibility lies with the pulp producer Navigator (Semapa AG), which guarantees private producers the sale of their …

Why, every four years, do we vote for PS and PSD politicians, to see them alternately leading parliament as they engage in their constant power struggles? And why is it that this same parliament then approves a government of ministers and secretaries of state, who do nothing more than worry about how best to guarantee their high offices for the maximum amount of time, clinging to power and to their comfortable armchairs? Are they not obliged to treat the country well? Have they not taken take their oath? Is it not their duty to serve the country with wise decisions? …

From Portugal to Norway on two rails… On this question, we were in agreement. It was an idea we had together during a long train ride. I was on my way to interview Per Espen Stoknes when a young man joined the train with his free Interrail ticket. It had been a nice gesture by the European Commission to offer such tickets to 18-year-olds, for the first time, enabling them to get to know Europe by train. Like me, he also wanted to travel to Gothenburg via Copenhagen. The train was standing in Hamburg at Platform 8 and the loudspeakers …