Portugal

“All cities are different. But, when it comes down to it, we’re all working for the same thing. Some follow one path, some follow another. Some might happen to lead the way, while others tend to follow along behind.” Fabíola Oliveira, from the forestry office, and Maria Elisabete Mato, an adviser to the mayor, have brought from the north of Portugal the solutions and challenges that are being experienced in Viana do Castelo. You presented the other municipalities with the inspiring example of a biogas plant. What are the advantages of this process? Maria Elisabete Mato: We have an intermunicipal …

In Coruche, a municipal strategy has been initiated with the aim of lowering the consumption and improving the reuse of resources. But difficulties are being encountered in the implementation of far-reaching changes in a municipality faced with desertification, an ageing population and the disappearance of family-based agriculture. I talked with Patrícia Moreira, from the department of land use development and planning, and Rosa Lopes, who is the council’s representative in matters relating to waste management, as well as energy and water efficiency. Coruche started last year with severe flooding, and later had record high temperatures, with several days at 46º. …

While climate change is a common challenge, the local realities all differ from one another. ECO123 talks to Marcelo Afonso, a municipal councillor and adviser to the mayor in Ansião, who is passionate about the walking trails in the enormous oak forest in his municipality. To what extent is climate change a concern in Ansião? Unfortunately, our population is rather dispersed and ageing, which makes our need to adapt to climate change a challenge. We have to change people who are highly resistant to changing certain habits that they have maintained over many years. They often don’t understand (or don’t …

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 …