One figure among the many that illustrate the island's reality is enough to understand what has happened in the first 25 years of the 21st century in territorial terms: water consumption has skyrocketed to such an extent that, to meet the needs of the growing population and a tourism sector attracting more than fifteen million people, water desalination has increased by 220%. In 1999, the Balearic Islands desalinated 10.2 million cubic meters of water; in 2024, this figure reached 32.9 million. This increase in desalination, with "the associated energy consumption," as the GOB (Balearic Ornithological Group) has denounced on several occasions, represents "a clear example of the unsustainability of the Balearic development model," in the words of its spokesperson, Margalida Ramis. Along these same lines, geographer Ivan Murray determined, in a study conducted a few years ago, that the Islands consume what they don't have: "We would need 16 archipelagos like ours to balance resource consumption and the territory's capacity to generate them," he states. The increase in desalination, with eight units currently installed and four more on the way, demonstrates how the Islands have based their economic model on "occupying more and more territory, causing significant alteration of the natural environment over the past 25 years," says Miquel Àngel March, former spokesperson for the GOB (Balearic Ornithological Group). "The rural land, which has been transformed into urban development, is an example of this phenomenon that seems to have no solution," he laments. The artificialization of the land

Water consumption far exceeding the islands' capacity can also be seen in energy and waste production. The Pla de Mallorca, Formentera, and Ibiza are facing a very complicated water situation, "and desalination alone is not the solution. What's needed is to stop it once and for all," explains March. According to data from Terraferida, an organization that emerged precisely during this quarter-century of runaway growth, "between 2015 and 2021, approximately 11.2 square kilometers of land in Mallorca were developed, most of which (nearly 70%) was agricultural or forest land unaffected by previous urbanization," states Jaume Adrover: "Intact fields and forests were transformed by concrete in just six years, a rate that reflects the uncontrolled expansion of land and resource consumption."

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The Pla de Mallorca Association has proposed to the government that a drought emergency could be declared on a municipality-by-municipality basis, without affecting the entire Demand Unit (remember, this includes Muro and Santa Margalida). Meanwhile, the government is studying the implementation of new parameters that could be used to declare an emergency in the Pla de Mallorca area soon.

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