Mallorca is one of the world’s leading mass-tourism destinations, and for an island this size, the ecological and social impacts show up in dramatic proportion: overexploited, salinised and polluted groundwater, an urban structure built almost entirely around Palma, and a rural landscape increasingly organised by the logic of tourism-driven development rather than the other way around.
Palma’s Son Sant Joan airport is a clear example of how this works. Its ongoing renovation is presented by Spain’s national airport operator, AENA, as a sustainability project: solar panels, LED lighting, efficient air conditioning, electric mobility. But since 2019, civil-society groups have organised against the underlying airport regulation plan, which is set to grow passenger numbers well beyond 2019 levels — AENA has described the works as “remodelling” rather than expansion, even as campaigners point out that passenger numbers keep rising. Similar conflicts around airport growth in Barcelona and Palma follow a shared pattern, campaigners argue: environmental injustice and “green” extractivism embedded directly into a tourism-led growth model, with real costs for public health and local ecosystems.
Alongside the airport works, AENA has proposed a large photovoltaic park on public land at Son Bonet, in the municipality of Marratxí — presented as a self-consumption energy solution for the airport, but criticised by local groups including Pulmó Verd and the Platform against the airport’s expansion as a project that mainly serves AENA’s own interest in renewable-energy investment, while removing one of the area’s last remaining green spaces and moving ahead with limited transparency. According to reporting by Última Hora and El Periódico de la Energía, the Balearic Government rejected the project after public opposition — but AENA has continued the permitting process regardless, saying it had not been formally notified of that decision.
Who bears the cost
Both conflicts can be read through what researcher Joan Martínez-Alier calls “ecological distribution conflicts”: cases where the gains from growth and the costs of it land on very different people. Here, the economic benefits of air connectivity and “green” energy provision accrue to AENA, airlines and tourism-linked interests, while nearby communities absorb the noise, pollution, land enclosure and pressure on scarce water that come with them — what geographers sometimes call sacrifice zones, where costs concentrate locally while benefits disperse globally through tourism and aviation networks.
Commons get enclosed and privatised in the name of sustainable development and job creation — while the ecological and social costs land, disproportionately, on the people with the least say in the decision.
None of this means green energy or better infrastructure are the problem. It means that neither can substitute for the harder question: how much air traffic, and how much tourism growth, an island like this can actually absorb. Environmental justice here would mean genuinely reducing material and energy throughput — not simply building a more efficient version of the same expanding system. That could look like a daily passenger cap, limits on short-haul flights, or a real tax on aviation fuel. It would also mean decisions about the island’s shared spaces being made with, not around, the communities who live with the consequences.
Drawing on reporting by Última Hora and El Periódico de la Energía, on GOB Mallorca, and on Joan Martínez-Alier’s concept of ecological distribution conflicts.