BRUSSELS: On green matters, most of us believe, the European Union is a progressive force. Yet the EU is also implicated in some of Europe’s worse acts of environmental vandalism, in pristine areas of eastern Europe as well as the west.

The Spanish government is promoting a “national hydrological plan” in the face of huge environmental opposition. The scale of the damage, made possible by EU funding, would be breathtaking. Huge numbers of dams, water channels and ditches would be built to transfer water from northern wetlands to the arid south. The scheme is driven by the demands of the Mediterranean coast, where a vast amount of water is consumed by tourists and farmers wanting irrigation for all-year-round strawberries.

These plans would be an ecological disaster for the wetlands of the north, including the internationally important Ebro delta, and for the south, where unsustainable farming practices would destroy the dry-land habitats of rare species such as the bustard. A hundred Natura 2000 sites would be damaged, making a mockery of the EU’s attempt to establish this network of fully protected conservation areas.

The Spanish government is wedded to the project, but it could not go ahead without European money.

This is not a one-off. The EU has been pouring money into road and dam projects in Spain and Portugal, many of them disastrous for wildlife. For one species, it is catastrophic. The Iberian lynx is Europe’s most endangered species, a solitary carnivore as charismatic as anything from the African plains.

The villain of the piece is the European regional development fund. Across Europe, the list of major wildlife areas threatened by this fund is shocking. It includes the Porto Lagos lagoons and Lake Vistonis in Greece.

In Britain the EU has supported environmental destruction through contributing to the development of the Cairngorms funicular railway.

EU-funded damage is not exclusive to western Europe. The European transport network for accession countries funds big road-building projects in eastern Europe. In north-eastern Poland, environmentalists are campaigning against the siting of the Via Baltica through the stunning Biebrza marshes. This road is one link in the EU dream of uninterrupted motorways from Cork to Helsinki. It doesn’t have to pass through the marshes, but local commercial interests want it there. This is a landscape teeming with rare species. It is a Polish national park and a potential Natura 2000 site.

But the EU has not protested; instead it has already invested millions in the Lithuanian and Latvian sections of the road, declaring these to be “without significant environmental impact”.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.