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In the 1980s, in the midst of the debate over whether Menorca should become a Biosphere Reserve, there were already warnings about the oxymoron implied by “sustainable growth”. Permanent growth in limited territories cannot be sustained over time without paying a high price. Lately, we have been witnessing the revival of this debate.
Forty years later, there are still those who present sustainable growth as a solution, sometimes through a lack of reflection but often to greenwash the cement and asphalt of a lifetime.
At the end of the century, people began to speak of “carrying capacity” as a way of defining the pressure that a given space could absorb without causing harmful effects. It is a term that was fully adopted by the World Tourism Organization. Therefore, it is particularly relevant to a place like ours, which is eminently tourist-oriented.
Carrying capacity is usually based on a series of indicators that make it possible to see whether the physical limits of spaces are being exceeded, whether environmental degradation is occurring, whether the local community is raising its voice because of excessive tourist pressure, or whether visitors themselves are experiencing a reduced perception of the quality of the tourist experience.
These are aspects that currently appear close to the reality of Menorca, where well-known beaches exceed maximum attendance levels, aquifers are being depleted, waste is overwhelming us, or we have to restart the old engines of the power station despite having deployed significant solar parks.
Faced with this reality, there are usually two responses. One advocates unlimited growth, painted as sustainable. They call for more desalination plants, more roads, sending waste to be incinerated and hiding air pollution. They offer no solution to the lack of housing, the congestion on beaches or the social feeling that maximum levels are being exceeded.
The other calls for containment measures, such as genuinely regulating tourist vehicles, avoiding the promotion of summer tourism, conditioning water uses, redefining policies so that housing becomes a right again and not merely a business, eliminating tourist places as they are withdrawn from the market…
Neither position is anti-tourist. But the first cannot be maintained without causing —as it already is— serious negative consequences, because it clearly exceeds the carrying capacity in different parameters.
It is revealing that the current island and regional governments, by mutual agreement, removed precisely two years ago the reference to the carrying capacity of the island of Menorca that existed in the legislation in force and **which established, as a legal principle, that tourism activity should be organised in a manner consistent with the carrying-capacity thresholds of the island as determined.
Indeed, Decree-Law 3/2024 amended section k) of Article 5 of the Menorca Biosphere Reserve Law. Laws are amended by Parliament, but when the Balearic Government and the Island Council have a majority of the same political colour, it is evident that a change of this kind is made with mutual approval.
Therefore, it seems very naive to trust that the current offices in Plaça Biosfera will, on their own initiative, promote changes consistent with the real principles of sustainability or carrying capacity. Sustainable is an adjective that qualifies but does not change the meaning of the noun that precedes it.
(This text is an adaptation of the original article published by Miquel Camps, as coordinator of territorial policy for the GOB, in the Menorca newspaper on 31/08/2026).