Polluted lagoon set to become first ecosystem in Europe with its own rights

Spanish MPs have voted to give a heavily polluted lagoon, labelled one of the biggest ecological catastrophes in Europe, ‘legal personality’, meaning that any citizen can go to court to defend it.

Last week, the Congress of Deputies in Madrid approved a law that would give the Mar Menor and its entire basin the first ecosystem in Europe with its own rights, as if it were a person or a company.

The Mar Menor is a protected site under the international Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, but runoff rich in fertiliser from decades of intensive agriculture and illegal irrigation has drained into the lagoon, leading to the death of thousands of marine animals in recent years.

In 2016, 85 per cent of the seabed vegetation died because of extreme eutrophication, where an excess of nutrients boosts growth of algae and plants, removing oxygen from the water and blocking light.

In 2019 and 2021 thousands of dead fish and crustaceans were washed up on shore and campaigners fear it will be repeated this summer, with recent heavy rains possibly exacerbating the problem.

All parties in the congress, except for the far-right Vox party, voted for the popular legislative initiative (ILP) which had been endorsed by more than 600,000 signatures.

The initiative will now return to the Ecological Transition Commission for consideration. It is hoped the Mar Menor will receive its new status by the end of May, once the law is voted on and approved in the plenary session of congress.

Teresa Vicente, professor of philosophy of Law at the University of Murcia, told El Pais that the initiative represented a "radical change" in the paradigm applied until now, so that nature goes from being treated as "an object at the service of humanity" to being "a subject of rights" and "from being a slave to being a citizen”.

Currently, some 39 farming companies are being investigated for illegal practices in the region.

In February, E&T revealed that one of the companies,  Gs España, a British company that provides UK supermarkets with fresh salad during the winter, stood accused of being responsible for €2.5m worth of environmental damage – the most out of all the companies being investigated.

E&T has also reported that some proposed engineering solutions aimed at saving the Mar Menor are proving controversial.