How to create a network of protected areas in Portugal? We have the recipe, we lack the will | Opinion

The way nature is protected in a country is a mirror of its development. In Portugal, despite the immense potential for wildlife, the network of protected areas it is weak and fragmented, a patchwork where nature here and there survives. But for nature to go from surviving to thriving, more is needed. There are good opportunities to give more, to restore the lost and forgotten charm of the natural world, and to do so it is enough just to look at the landscape with a new eye.

A network of protected areas is made up of living landscapes linked by ecological corridors. They are diverse places, from mountains to plains, from rivers to the high seas, where wildlife exists in both diversity and abundance. Where natural processes (such as floods or low-intensity fires) can shape the landscape, where nature has the time and space to develop and evolve.

First, we need to find more space for nature, not through the arrangement of statistics but through measurements on the ground. On land, the abandonment of agricultural activity on marginal lands is not a problem, it is an opportunity. By combining unowned land with land purchases, the State can transform fragmented landscapes that are unproductive for agriculture into compact natural zones that “produce nature”, in the form of ecotourism and other forms of income, such as credits for carbonin biodiversity or nitrates.

It is also possible to complement nature areas by encouraging community or private protected areas, both in vacant areas and on farms (as is already the case in other countries and continents). At sea, work with fishermen and local communities to create areas where fishing is reduced or altered with the aim of increasing fish numbers by creating refuges, both in coastal areas and offshore.

Second, it is necessary to reduce barriers and unite natural areas through ecological corridors, which can be done in two ways: one, by creating passages between humanized areas, such as ecological viaducts (as already happens on some highways in the North of the country for the wolf ); another, by reducing the density of the human footprint, closing roads in natural areas and removing obsolete dams and dams to join sections of rivers and streams.

Thirdly, we know that it is decisive to help some species recover numbers and expand their distribution, through reintroduction programs, such as the media case of the Iberian lynx, but extended to more species, from animals, such as mammals, birds and fish, plants, taking into account the places where they existed in the past and the future impact of climate change.

A network of protected areas is a group of interconnected landscapes, in which fish such as sturgeon (now extinct in Portugal) can complete their life cycle, migrate to spawn in rivers, develop in estuary areas and reach adulthood in high seas. In which tuna and whales can pass along the Portuguese coast, from the Algarve to Minho, through a network of protected areas in which fishing is prohibited or limited.

Where migrating birds have a network of wetlands from north to south of the country. A landscape in which herbivores, such as deer, can move with the rhythm of the seasons in search of shelter and food, between high areas, such as plateaus, and low areas, such as plains.

The best investment you can make today, in a time of environmental challenges, is in restoring nature. The recipe for creating a truly functional network of protected areas in Portugal is not difficult to imagine, it is the desire to implement it that seems difficult to find.