Mallorca’s Water Management Strategies: A Critical Review

In order to reduce the extreme seasonality in tourist arrivals to Mallorca, and thus the huge impact on the island’s water resources in a short space of time discussed in the last post, Mallorca's local government have made strong efforts to adopt a "quality tourism model" in the hotel sector. This post aims to critically assess this management strategy, as well as alternatives.

The quality tourism model moves away from Mallorca’s typical mass tourism high rise high-density hotels that we all know and love, towards residential tourism in the form of large second homes. Aimed at wealthier tourists, this tourist accommodation is characterised by numerous water fixtures, particularly irrigated gardens, swimming pools and golf courses. The model takes an off-season strategy with higher open months annually, aimed at reducing seasonality.

This model has been strongly supported by Mallorca’s public administration since the mid-1990s, whose actions include reducing the need for environmental requirements in planning. For example, Law 6/2009 states that reports by hydrological planning sectors to ensure a good water supply are no longer required, in order to save administration processing time for planning and building residential tourist plots. Ultimately this amounts to a reduction in the government’s role in tourism planning - which doesn't bode well for the success of sustainable tourism.

Does It Really Work?

Since its implementation, there has been much scepticism regarding the quality tourism model’s effectiveness, in both effectively managing water resources and reducing seasonality of tourist water demand.

Per person, the quality model has greater water consumption than the mass tourism model. This is largely due to it's proliferation of garden irrigation, which accounts for >70% of quality tourist areas' summer water consumption. Furthermore, rather than reducing the strong seasonality in water demand, the high numbers of water fixtures (such as swimming pools) create a constant demand for water and additional annual peaks in water demand. This is exacerbated by the promotion of off-season tourism and greater open months annually which lead to peaks even in January which was previously the island's month of minimum water consumption. This acts to just increase Mallorca’s total water consumption, increasing it's vulnerability to potential climate change induced water shortages in the future.

Alternatives

Water supply can be increased through desalination, which in Mallorca accounted for 17% of the natural freshwater resources in 2014. Yet desalination has been critiqued as a “sustainability fix”. It has a very high energy demand, and it has been argued that the massive construction costs (e.g. 14,551,578 Euros for one plant in Palma, Mallorca) have contributed to Spanish state's financial crisis. Furthermore, the relatively high costs of desalinated water have lead to it's commodification and thus privatisation of public water supplies. For example, in Mallorca's Calvia municipality all water companies were publically owned until the 1990s, whereas now only one still is.

Overall, I would argue that rather than focus on technical fixes such as desalination, which come with their own environmental and economic problems, Mallorca should focus on more efficient management of the tourism sector's water demand. Although desalination can help increase water supply in the short-term solution, the root cause lies in reduction of water supply through strong seasonality in tourist arrivals and contamination of groundwater supplies, as discussed in my last post. Clearly, the quality tourism model acts to exacerbate the problem rather than solve it, therefore alternative strategies such as higher water efficiency standards in hotels and re-use of water should be considered. Furthermore, contamination of existing water supplies should be reduced through increased environmental accountability checks of hotels. The government should take a leading role rather than it's current reduction in involvement, as it has the power to both coordinate and implement the required policies and measures.