From Luis Babiano, manager of the Blue Community AEOPAS – Asociación Española de Operadores Públicos de Abastecimiento y Saneamiento (Spanish Association of Public Water Supply and Sanitation Operators):
Floods: why rebuilding doesn’t make us more resilient.
Water security requires a change in the model: risk governance, structural investment, and urban water systems prepared for extreme scenarios.
Water security is not determined at a single point in the territory, but rather along the functional continuum that connects headwaters, floodplains, and coastal areas. The recent series of storms has confirmed the interdependent nature of the system: while the Sierra de Cádiz experienced the most intense hydrometeorological events and critical situations for public safety, the territorial, economic, and urban water service impacts extended throughout the middle and lower reaches of the basin, from the Guadalete floodplain to the coast and the Campo de Gibraltar. This functional continuum is also the true scale at which water security must be considered.
This continuous system stores the resources that sustain the downstream development model and manages floods that reduce risk in the most densely populated areas, but it also tests infrastructures, institutional capacities, and economic balances that vary greatly depending on the territorial scale. The result is that the overall resilience depends on the functionality of each of its parts.
