The five main green organisations operating in Spain have launched an environmental appeal to political parties in the run-up to December’s general elections.

Friends of the Earth, Ecologists in Action, Greenpeace, SEO/BirdLife and WWF have stressed the urgent need for any new government to create a vice-presidency for sustainability, that would be able to coordinate and oversee cross-sector policy making.

“Had a vice-presidency for sustainability existed, it never would have approved the sun tax,” said Asunción Ruiz from SEO/BirdLife. On 9 October, Spain passed a tax on individual consumption on solar energy which, according to NGOs, has hindered the adoption of photovoltaic energy.

Ruiz said that a vice-presidency in this field would not only have taken into account the question of grid stability when tackling the legislation, but would also have considered other “social benefits”. The five organisations are calling on political parties to scrap this law on individual consumption (currently, suppliers are not paying for solar power of under 100kW added to the grid).



The environmental lobby had already pitched the creation of this vice-presidency prior to the regional elections in May. It is one of 17 proposals that the group presented last week in Madrid under the title ‘A Programme for the Earth’. The organisations aim to meet with the leaders of each party to present their proposals.

International agencies had also drawn up very similar proposals to some aspects of the plan. From a fiscal perspective, the NGOs are calling for green reforms of the same kind that the OECD proposed to Spain in March. They are counting on eliminating “subsidies for fossil fuels”, a suggestion which has also been made by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The group of NGOs believes that an “energy audit” should take place to uncover “the real costs of the system”, emphasises Mario Rodríguez of Greenpeace. In its latest report on the Spanish energy sector, published in July, the IEA highlighted that electricity costs for an average home rose by 65% between 2008 and 2014. However, in the same period, the cost of producing energy fell by 36%.

Rodríguez has also argued that so-called sun tax should be scrapped; 18 of Spain’s opposition parties promised to do so a few months ago. The five NGOs are also campaigning for the closure of nuclear power stations after thirty years of operation. The ruling People’s Party (PP) is considering extending their operation for another two decades.

This audit of the energy system is linked to policies to fight climate change and develop renewable energy sources. The NGOs want the next government to approve a climate change bill with ambitious targets, calling for a 55% reduction in greenhouse gases and for 45% of the energy mix to be from renewable sources by 2030.

One of the 17 proposals that Paco Segura from Ecologists in Action finds particularly important is the development of a plan to improve air quality. “Within the next four years it should be guaranteed that the entire population is breathing air that falls within the legal limits for contamination, he saaid. “In many ways we are only calling for compliance with the law.”

One of the “battles” in the next legislative session will be around water, Juan Carlos del Olmo of WWF predicts. The environmental organisations are proposing that the next executive does not build any more dams or water transfer networks. In addition, they believe that by 2030 30% of Spain’s agricultural land should be “organically farmed”. For his part, Alejandro Gonzálex (Friends of the Earth) insists that proposed reforms to the Coastal Protection Act should be scrapped.