Slogan: Know, take care and protect your river
Presentació del projecte al professorat de Secundària.pdf
BACKGROUND AND PRESENTATION OF THE PROJECT
The Palància river is a Mediterranean river system with a catchment area of more than 976 km2 that originates in El Toro and flows into the municipalities of Sagunt and Canet d'en Berenguer. Although it has a fluvial regime of continuous circulation at the headwaters, from Sot de Ferrer onwards it only carries water with fairly significant floods. This means that the mouth of the river is dry most of the time and that, both in Sagunt and Canet d'en Berenguer, the perception of the plain as a river is quite distorted. If we add to this the strong industrial character of the population of the Port of Sagunt, we can understand that the citizens are more detached from the river than in other stretches (with a greater agricultural tradition).
The result of this ‘living with one's back to the river’ has been a continuous aggression against the river territory through the indiscriminate occupation of its space, the extraction of aggregates, the dumping of rubbish, etc.
However, the river constitutes a green space of inestimable ecological importance for the environment that should be enhanced. To date, none of the plans for the restoration of the mouth of the river which have been carried out have been effective, largely because the measures applied have been inadequate, a fact which shows a great lack of knowledge of river dynamics. To this should be added the forthcoming installation of the Volkswagen company in Sagunto and the significant demand for artificial land that this will entail to cover urban, industrial and logistical functions.
At this point it is essential to have a good territorial planning that ensures the survival of the natural spaces linked to the river, as it is the great green lung of the area, as well as an important factor of flood risk to which it is advisable to adapt. Most current environmental strategies point in this direction, both at international, national and regional level: Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development Goals, European Green Pact, Climate Change Adaptation Strategies, etc.
However, this process of good practice must be supported by a solid social base based on citizen participation. And the first step consists of educating and informing the population about how the river works, about its potential, about its role as a resource and as a risk, about the opportunity that is now opening up to stop living with our backs to the river and to include it in our lives. The first step to protect it is to know it and the second is to take care of it.
In this sense, local environmental (Acció Ecologista-Agró) and cultural (Nautilus) associations, in collaboration with Sagunto Town Council (Casal Jove), have recently carried out various awareness-raising initiatives, under the general slogan ‘What Palancia do we want?’, in which members of the University of Valencia and the General Directorate of Territorial Planning of the Generalitat Valenciana collaborated.
These initiatives had a wide social response in the different adult age groups, but a scarce echo among young people, despite the fact that one of the activities was carried out from the Casal Jove, with teaching staff from the University and aimed specifically at this age group.
Based on these results, the present project arises from the need to reach out to young people in order to include them in the communication process. Given that the usual channels of explanation (talks, excursions along the river) were not sufficiently efficient, this project proposes a pilot test in which, in collaboration with the educational centres, classroom teaching resources are combined with participation through social networks.
