Madrid Neighborhood Movement Takes Fight Against Tree Felling to the European Parliament

The neighborhood movement against the felling of trees for the extension of line 11 of the Madrid metro will arrive at the European Parliament on Thursday the 21st. The spokespersons for the movement will ask the organization to take a position on the logging plan of the Department of Transport of the Community of Madrid to carry out the work. The European Parliament’s Petitions Committee will listen to residents for five minutes, which is the time they have to present the petition, to which 1,132 people have already joined. The Community of Madrid also has the option of presenting its part, but the Minister of Transport, Jorge Rodrigo Domínguez, confirmed this Tuesday that no representative of the regional government will attend. If they had done so, the neighbors would have another two minutes of reply. Afterwards, the groups will intervene to decide whether to raise the request to the Environment Committee of the European Parliament.

The neighbors arrive at the European Parliament before having been able to meet with the Madrid City Council, responsible for authorizing the felling of the trees, with which they have requested an appointment to discuss the issue on several occasions and have not received a response, according to reports from the platform I defend this tree. In the case of the Community of Madrid, the residents met once last March with the former Minister of Transport and Infrastructure David Pérez and the general director of Infrastructure Miguel Núñez. At that meeting, the Community of Madrid promised to study the project again and reduce felling: they have gone from 1,027 to 880 fewer trees between felling and transplants, according to the maps provided by the Ministry of Transport. For the neighbors it is still an unacceptable figure and they defend that there are alternatives that would save a large part of the specimens, most of them mature trees that are engines of reducing air pollution and noise. The main motto of the movement is “Metro yes, but not like that.”

Last Friday, September 15, the vice president of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety of the European Parliament, the socialist César Luena, approached the fence that surrounds the Madrid Río construction zone to talk to the neighbors and get information. about the felling planned in the environmental assessment of the Department of Transport before the residents went to Brussels. Although he went as an MEP, he acknowledged that he had asked him to be Reyes Maroto, the socialist leader in Madrid. He toured with some of the spokespersons some of the locations where these fellings are going to occur: the Madrid Río grove, the surroundings of Palos de la Frontera and the Atocha station, where cedars that are more than 100 years old from the garden of Jimena Quirós and trees protected as they are within the territory of the landscape of light, declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 2021 in the category of cultural landscape. “If we compare Madrid with Paris, Berlin or London, we see that these cities do not destroy groves or reduce gardens,” criticized Luena; to which he added: “It is a denialism [del cambio climático] daily”.

In addition to going to Brussels, the residents have also denounced the Community of Madrid before the European Investment Bank (EIB), which finances three quarters of the 500 million euros that the work will cost, for not meeting the objectives of sustainability that this organization has. The complaint sent to the EIB complaints mechanism includes several irregularities that residents have pointed out in the project. The first, that the Community modified the project without carrying out an Environmental Impact Study corresponding to the fellings, which went from 79 trees, according to the initial project, to 1,027. The neighbors also allege that the construction of stations like the one at Madrid Río is going to be done in a park that has a level of urban protection that does not allow trees to be cut down.

According to the text of the complaint, to which EL PAÍS has had access, “the documents that appear on the EIB website relating to the Expansion Project for line 11 of the Madrid Metro, drafted and approved prior to the loan granted by said entity to the Community of Madrid for the financing of the work, do not coincide with the Project Modification carried out, nor with the document submitted to Simplified Environmental Impact Assessment through notifications made on July 26, 2023. The European Investment Bank could block the financing of the project to the Community of Madrid if they consider that these modifications do not meet their sustainability objectives, one of the main pillars of the entity.

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