Climate activists filled holes in 10 golf courses in Spain to protest high water consumption.
As the climate protection group Extinction Rebellion announced on Sunday, the night actions were aimed at golf courses in barcelona, Madrid, Valenceat the Basque countryin the region Navarre and on the island Ibiza against “wasting water during one of the worst droughts Europe has ever seen”.
“Golf has no place in a world without water,” declared Extinction Rebellion. Some of the activists filled the holes with cement, others planted seedlings.
“Just one hole on a golf course uses more than 100,000 liters of water a day to maintain the surrounding green,” said Extinction Rebellion, citing data from environmental organization Ecologists In Action.
“In Spain, 437 golf courses are irrigated every day,” criticized the climate protection group. This means that golf courses use more water than the populations of Madrid and Barcelona combined.
However, only 0.6% of the population played golf.
According to experts, parts of Spain are drier than they have been in a thousand years. After the hottest and driest spring since the beginning of meteorological records, 60 percent of the country was in a state of alert in early June, according to the European Drought Observatory, because there was a lack of rain and the first heat wave of the summer caused record temperatures of more than 44 degrees Celsius.