Mayor of Calvia to speak at the Johannesburg Summit

The Mayor of Calvia, Margarita Nájera, will delliver a paper on the future of Calvia at the World Summitt on sustainable development in Johannesburg. She will deliver the paper, called Intra and Inter Governmental Cooperation for Sustainable Development: Calvia's Experience, on Thursday. Nájera, who travelled to South Africa on Sunday, said that the 1992 summit in Rio de Janeiro raised awareness, and now, ten years later, Johannesburg will mark a new impulse. She also said that “making another world possible is not a process of leadership but of awareness among people.” The Mayor is accompanied by a small delegation, and in a communique issued yesterday, the council said that the purpose of the summit is not only to improve the quality of life but also to preserve natural resources, due to the increase in demand for food, housing, energy, health services and financial security. Another of the objectives is the revision of the commitments signed in the Rio de Janeiro summit. Last June, Calvia was also invited to the meeting in Bali which was held to prepare the Johannesburg summit and to speak on the role played by local administrations in the face of the advance of globalisation. But ironically, while Nájera is in Johannesburg, the environmental group GOB has filed three appeals against licences granted for the construction of 114 homes in Bendinat (Calvia), claiming that they infringe the Council of Majorca's moratorium on building. Work is due to start in October, but it will be halted as a precaution if GOB's appeals are accepted for study. A spokesman for GOB said that the licences broke the moratorium which suspended the granting of licences for new blocks of flats until the master plan for the island was drawn up. GOB said that there has already been too much building in the Bendinat area, and in Calvia as a whole, and it should be stopped.