Environmental Reports Impact On Property Prices
November 22nd, 2007
Recent reports on the effect of global warming on Spain’s coastline are blamed for falling property prices in Murcia.
Earlier this month, Greenpeace released a book of photographs, Photoclima: Imágenes de un futuro afectado por el cambio climático, showing the effect of global warming on Spain’s environment. Among the most dramatic images were those showing how rises in sea level would lead to the strip of land separating Murcia’s Mar Menor from the Mediterranean, La Manga, being completely submerged by 2050.
Now Spanish estate agents are reporting that property prices on La Manga have almost halved since this time last year, falling from 4,000 euros per square metre to 2,300 and several have pointed out that buyers who’ve been deterred from purchasing on La Manga have been buying elsewhere on the coast, in places that would also be threatened by flooding should the sea rise by as much as Greenpeace predicts. (Note that La Manga Club is not actually on the La Manga strip.)
Other images in the book included a dried-up river Ebro, which would lead to the loss of the Costa del Azahar’s citrus-farming industry, and of glacial destruction in the Pyrenees, although these images do not seem to have had such a dramatic effect on property prices in the areas portrayed. The truth is, if the rise in global warming was sufficient to do the damage to La Manga portrayed in the book, not just La Manga but the whole planet would be affected to some degree. Spain’s government is taking the possible effects of climate change very seriously, and is proposing a raft of measures to reduce the risk to vulnerable areas, including stopping all building on La Manga.
Full story from homesworldwide.co.uk
