Ecologistas en Acción Lanzarote has presented a series of allegations against the third sand quarry in the Muñique area, whose environmental authorization is being processed by the General Directorate of Industry in the middle of the Special Protection Area for Birds (SPA) “Northern Islets of Lanzarote and Famara”, which is part of the Natura 2000 Network.
In addition, it has announced that it will forward to the Prosecutor's Office alleged irregularities in the processing of some of the permits that have been requested in the area, “in case it could constitute a crime of environmental prevarication”. Specifically, the environmental group denounces that, “while in 2018 the General Directorate of Nature Protection reported indicating that the extension of the validity period of the authorization should be subject to ordinary environmental impact assessment, last year the General Directorate of the Fight against Climate Change and the Environment changed its criteria, requiring only a simplified evaluation”.
Meanwhile, in its allegations to the Canary Islands Government, Ecologistas en Acción requests that an unfavorable Environmental Impact Statement be issued for the authorizations in process and that measures be taken “to force the previous mining companies to restore the now abandoned exploitations”. Otherwise, they warn, “the new proliferation of quarries and other illegal activities such as waste dumping threaten to further deteriorate the values of this area”.
In fact, they denounce precisely that “various authorizations are being processed simultaneously in the same protected space, without evaluating their cumulative and synergistic impacts”.
From Ecologistas en Acción they also demand to annul or revise the continuity in the Island Plan of Ordination of the Zone of Extractive Activity of Las Melianas, next to Muñique, “because the activity is incompatible with the preservation of the environmental and landscape values, in addition to threatening several populations of birds in danger of extinction such as the houbara bustard, the Egyptian vulture and also the Canary shrew”.
“All that”, they add, “despite the fact that the administration itself recognized, twenty years ago, that the extraction of aggregates in the open air is one of the activities that is most affecting the integrity of the landscape and natural values of the island”.
