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The first year we focused on understanding what had happened in the Mar Menor and its surrounding agricultural area, the Campo de Cartagena, to reach the current socio-environmental crisis. Paula travelled the area recording life-story interviews of 28 people living both on the mainland and in the lagoon area and talking about the transformations that took place over the last 50 years.<
Based on the interviews, we wrote three complementary short stories about the land transformation from the point of view of farmers, lagoon activists, fishermen, and tourist sector workers. We shared these stories in three sectoral focus groups in December 2021, following a timeline methodology that allowed us to supplement and improve them. Finally, we brought all three stories together into a single piece, describing the intertwined story of transformations along the land-see continuum.
In association with the artists Raquel Meyers and Lorna Bieman, we explored unwritten ways to tell the story, bringing it to life graphically and aurally. This first phase of the research enabled us to better understand the historical and territorial context, as well as the variety of experiences of this context and the fracture between Campo de Cartagena (the land) and the Mar Menor (the sea).
Furthermore, as part of her PhD thesis, Paula and her supervisors Julia Martínez and Jampel Dell’Angelo worked on a dynamic systems model to explain the historical growth dynamics of irrigation in the basin of the Segura River in the last 50 years. More specifically, this model causally links governance failures with the increased expectations of irrigation water and, consequently, an excessive increase in irrigation.
Paula Andrea Zuluaga-Guerra, Julia Martinez-Fernandez, Miguel Angel Esteve-Selma, Jampel Dell’Angelo. A socio-ecological model of the Segura River basin . Ecological Modelling. Volume 478, April 2023, 110284.
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For her part, Violeta revised a sample of scientific-technical literature, social media debates, and press items in order to analyse the controversies around the eutrophication of the lagoon and how they relate to existing uncertainties in current knowledge. The results of this analysis allowed us to anticipate the main narratives which aim to explain and provide solutions to the crisis of the Mar Menor, which participants in the next stage of co-research would probably share.
Violeta Cabello & Marcela Brugnach. Whose waters, whose nutrients? Knowledge, uncertainty, and controversy over eutrophication in the Mar Menor. Ambio Volume 52, pages 1112–1124 (2023).
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