A total of 22 municipalities in the Valencian Community, concentrated in large areas, are responsible for more than 50% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the entire territory, while the most polluting sectors are transport and energy.
These are the main conclusions of the Inventory of Greenhouse Gas Emissions of the Municipalities of the Valencian Community presented this week by the Minister for Ecological Transition, Mireia Mollà.
In this regard, she stressed that “it is not a question of criminalising sectors or municipalities” but of knowing the reality so that “agile and courageous” decisions can be made that allow meeting the objectives set to reduce polluting emissions by 40% in 2030 and the neutralisation climate in 2050, aligned with national and European policies.
In Alicante, 9 municipalities (6%) are responsible for more than 50% of emissions, including Alicante, Elche, Torrevieja, Orihuela, Benidorm and San Vicent del Raspeig, in this case due to the increased use of private cars and the private sector, as well as residential homes which attract tourism.
Mollà has pointed out that a map has been created which shows which productive sectors “should concentrate the effort to make an efficient ecological transition, without forgetting the individual and collective social part, such as private transport”, which appears as one of the main sectors responsible for emissions.
In this way, a municipality can develop a “more direct” mobility policy to mitigate climate change, while the part of the productive sectors will correspond to the regional, national and European governments.
Likewise, she explained that these indicators are presented in the logic of the Climate Change and Transition Law, which “creates the tax figures of green fiscal policy and a finalist fund for environmental policies, where our objective is to serve for payments for environmental services”.
For his part, the senior technician of the University Institute of Information and Communication Technologies Edgar Lorenzo, in charge of explaining the model, highlighted that the Valencian Community is “the first to have a high-resolution emission inventory of municipal magnitude”.
Thus, the model used calculates 163 indicators in 541 municipalities to indicate the “focuses of emission of priority action to obtain a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions”.
Specifically, gross emissions in the Valencian Community in 2019 accounted for 29.3 million tons of CO2 equivalent, mainly due to energy production and transport, while the forest area is capable of fixing 6 million tons.
In this way, net emissions in the regional sphere are 23.3 million tons of CO2 equivalent emitted into the atmosphere, 4.69 per inhabitant. Mollá has clarified that although the data is from 2019 they are “more real” because the data from 2020 and 2021, in the midst of a pandemic, “are not reliable”.
