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Eco123 Revista da Economia e Ecologia
Saturday, 3rd October 2020
by Uwe Heitkamp
This week, Europe’s largest airline, Lufthansa, took an important decision that is attracting attention all over Europe. The airline’s flight academy based in Bremen is recommending that 700 trainee pilots interrupt their training because there will be no need for new pilots over the next few years. Lufthansa wants to take 150 aeroplanes out of operation on a permanent basis, and consequently now has too many pilots on board. It will be a long time before these pilots retire and before any new pilots will need to be contracted. How is TAP (Ryanair etc.) dealing with the reduced number of bookings for its flights? And how is António Costa handling the situation?
Shall we carry on flying? The Portuguese state’s decision to press ahead with the Montijo airport violates two of the main pillars of the European Ecological Pact: fighting global climate change and reversing the biodiversity crisis. In an article published last week in Science magazine, José Alves, a researcher at the University of Aveiro (UA) and Maria Dias, a researcher with BirdLife International, called on the government to stop the project and turn Portugal into a successful example of the implementation of the European Ecological Pact.
The article (https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.abe4325) highlights the contradiction between the European Commission’s intention to change the European economies to more sustainable models (European Ecological Pact) and the environmental authorisation issued by a member state (Portugal) for the construction of Montijo Airport, in the heart of the major wetland area in the country, the Tagus Estuary.
As the two researchers point out, ‘the Tagus Estuary in front of the Vasco da Gama bridge is a major international hub for the migratory birds using the East Atlantic Flyway, serving as a bridge between their breeding grounds in the northern hemisphere and their wintering grounds in southern Europe and Africa, used by an estimated 300,000 waterfowl.’
‘These birds move in the Tagus Estuary in flocks that may consist of tens of thousands of birds, taking advantage of the complex mosaic of estuarine habitats, such as marshlands and mudbanks, shaped over the course of millennia by the action of nature, and more recently, by human intervention, in the form of salt marshes and rice paddies,’ they add. Scientists give as an example the flocks of up to 80,000 black-tailed godwits that reproduce in Iceland and Holland and congregate every year in the Tagus Estuary to feed and rest during their annual migration. They are on the IUCN Red List of birds threatened with extinction.
The authors of the article call upon the Portuguese government to reconsider its decision to give the go-ahead for the construction of Montijo airport, and to seize the opportunity of Lisbon being the current European Green Capital to demonstrate true leadership at an international level in the global movement for a sustainable future, making Portugal a success story in the implementation of the European Ecological Pact.
