The Minister of Territorial Policy, Territorial Cohesion and Water of the Government of the Canary Islands, Manuel Miranda, announced this Tuesday in the Parliament of the Canary Islands that his department is in the process of preparing a report to find out how the large population growth that has been observed in certain areas of the Canary Islands in recent years affects services. The study, as a pilot test, will be carried out on the island of Fuerteventura and "its results will be extrapolated to the rest of the territories in which the population has increased significantly," he explained. Miranda made this announcement during an answer to a question in the Chamber about the impact of population growth in certain areas of the Archipelago.
Manuel Miranda explained that the study, which will be commissioned to the public company Gestión y Planeamiento Territorial S.A. (Gesplan), aims to find out how this growth is affecting "basic services such as water or waste management, mobility, health, education or housing" and to determine how to recover "the balance between population and access to these services." As an example of this recovery, he pointed to the "location of spaces in which to implement new facilities or generating new land on which to build more homes, as proposed by the draft update of the Land Law that we have just presented."
The analysis aims to determine the real needs of the resident and visiting population. It will study the proximity of the population to services such as health, cultural, educational, green areas, social centers or public transport, among others. In addition, it will allow defining areas that can absorb new residential development, in response to the saturation of more occupied areas. The pilot project in Fuerteventura is developed at different scales (island, supramunicipal, municipal and population center) and its results will be extrapolated to other areas of the islands with a significant population increase in recent years.
The Minister pointed out that the growth rate in certain areas of the Archipelago is much higher than in the rest of the Canary Islands and this circumstance generates "a series of challenges in the provision of services and in the territorial balance of the island itself." This is, he indicated, another aspect from which to face the demographic challenge, which "concerns all the islands, each with its own singularities."
Miranda valued that both public administrations and Parliament "have placed the Challenge at the center of the political and social debate," and that what they are fundamentally pursuing is "to achieve a balance between population, territory, economy and society, even more important in a territory like ours, due to our condition as an outermost region and its fragmentation."
He recalled that, both by the Parliamentary Commission and by the working groups coordinated by Territorial Policy, Territorial Cohesion and Water from the Presidency, more than a hundred measures have already been proposed in this regard. "Many of them, together with the proposals that emerge from the report that we have commissioned, will be incorporated into the Canary Islands Strategy for the Demographic Challenge that we hope will be finalized throughout this year," Miranda added.
The Minister has informed, finally, of the actions in this sense that are already underway or close to being implemented. Among others, he cited the Observatory of the Demographic Challenge, the Virtual Office for municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants or the update of the Land Law itself, which includes specific measures for municipalities such as the increase in the percentage of transfer from 10% to 15% depending on what types of land. He also referred to the upcoming decree to speed up licenses that will allow increasing the supply of housing.