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16 environmental organisations that are active in the Balearics have asked the Government of the Balearic Islands to maintain the Balearic Commission of the Environment in response to its announcement that this public department of environmental control would be closed down.

The organisations have sent a letter to the President of the Government of the Balearic Islands, Margalida Prohens, in which they highlight the importance of the department as a contributory tool to guarantee the environmental future of these islands.

The letter states that they are aware of the Government’s intention to eliminate the Technical Committee of the Commision of the Environment of the Balearic Islands, due to a project decreed for administrative simplification:  the signatories, therefore, want to put it in perspective.

This Committee, created in 1986, is formed by representatives of different administrations, institutions and associations of the civil society that have various independent and constructive points of view, on the procedures of environmental evaluation. It exists for the wellbeing of the conservation of our land “considering its disappearance absolutely inadmissible”. It was exactly as explained in the letter sent to the President.

The signatories of the letter emphasised that in a small territorial area, affected by so many and such grave environmental pressures, as there are in the Balearic Islands, it ought to be possible to count on a body like this Commission that exists in the current legislature. A body that, as they indicate, “evaluates all the files that are brought to it with the utmost rigor and ensures above all the conservation of our most precious and representative environmental values”.

Furthermore, the environmental groups propose that before the current excessive and prolonged processing of the files that prejudice the administrators, the Commission should be provided with the personnel it needs to speed up its operating function.

Therefore, instead of removing the essential place of the Commission, it is requested that it be given the importance that it deserves and, rather than destroying it, work is done to modernize it. It is considered, therefore, more necessary that the Government supports an increase of personnel and endows it with the necessary material means to speed up the processing of environmental administrative files and guarantees the sustainability of the Islands.

List of signatory environmental groups

Alianza por el Agua de Ibiza y Formentera, Amics de la Terra Eivissa, Asociación de Productores Ecologicos de Ibiza y Formentera, Fudación Cleanwave, Grupo de Amigos en Defensa del Medio Ambiente, GEN-GOB Eivissa, GOB Mallorca, GOB Menorca, Greenpeace España, Iniciativa de Custodia del Territorio de las Islas Baleares (ICTIB), Marilles, Save the Med, SEO/Bird Life, Sociedad de Historia Natural de las Baleares, Sociedad Ornitológica de Menorca, WWF España.