Ecologist associations in the Axarquía are completely against the building of a desalination plant to alleviate present and future droughts in the area.

Such a plant would be to provide irrigation water for subtropical plantations but it would be very expensive to build and run, which is why the ecologists are against it and offer other solutions.

The Spokesman for ecologist group GENA-Ecologistas en Acción, Rafael Yus, pointed out that such a plant was contemplated to come about by 2017 for the irrigation-water demands of the time, but by that year this demand had outgrown the envisaged output so it never came about.

According to GENA, desalination is the very last option available that should only be contemplated when all other options have failed.

The answer, or at least the first step, is to stop authorising farmers from turning secano (non-irrigated land) into regadio (irrigated land). This should go hand-in-hand with the installation of more efficient irrigation systems that require less water per hectare under cultivation, and, very importantly, using recycled water from sewage treatment plants.

Building a desalination plant would just encourage farmers to grow more water-thirsty crops. Furthermore, GENA consider, control over irrigation expansion has been lax.

Desalination:
The leading process for desalination is reverse osmosis (RO). The RO, membrane processes use semipermeable membranes and applied pressure (on the membrane feed side) to induce water permeation through the membrane while rejecting salts.

Desalination processes produce large quantities of brine, as well as residues from pre-treatment and cleaning chemicals. Brine is denser than seawater and therefore sinks to the ocean bottom and can damage the ecosystem. Furthermore, brine dispersal from the desalination plants has been seen to travel several kilometers away, meaning that it has the potential to cause harm to ecosystems far away from the plants.

(News: Axarquia, Costa del Sol, Malaga, Andalucia)