Eduardo González
Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares warned on Wednesday that the European Union must establish “more robust mechanisms” to prevent “increasingly larger and more frequent” wildfires caused by global warming.
The wildfire situation has improved slightly in Spain, but the National Meteorological Agency (Aemet) has warned of an extreme risk of new fires due to the recent heat wave, prompting the Spanish government to activate the European Civil Protection Mechanism.
“The reality we see year after year, here in Spain and in Europe, is that wildfires are becoming more frequent; every place is experiencing increasingly larger fires; temperatures are getting higher and higher; and in response, we need to fight European wildfires, as we already do, with European mechanisms, which is something that still needs strengthening,” Albares told RFI’s ‘Le grand invité international’ program.
“I want to thank Portugal, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Serbia, which are helping Spain, but we must also work on prevention,” he continued. “We must reduce risks to also improve our ability to anticipate them,” he warned.
“The European Union has the right mechanisms, the civil protection mechanisms, but we must accept that fires are occurring more frequently, that temperature peaks are higher, that today we have fires, in Spain and in Europe, in places where there traditionally were no fires,” and therefore, “the European Union has to adapt with more robust mechanisms, with more diverse mechanisms, such as, for example, firefighting aircraft,” he declared.
According to the minister, “it is not only a question of mechanisms, but also of facing things head-on,” and therefore, “we must fight against climate denial, against all those political forces or all those people who think that climate change is something that does not exist, and we must work to make European green pacts broader.”
“It’s a matter of growth, competitiveness, and job creation, but we must recognize that there are increasing vulnerabilities to climate change,” he insisted. “We must fight against all of this; we must reindustrialize and embrace technological innovation, which we must also use to create quality jobs,” Albares stated. “It’s a collective responsibility we all share; climate change policy isn’t a partisan issue, it’s a legal obligation for the benefit of the next generation,” he concluded.