Eduardo González
The Third Vice President and Minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Sara Aagesen, spoke this Monday at the High-Level Segment of the thirtieth United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, where she cited the October 2014 floods in Valencia caused by a DANA storm and the wildfires of last summer in Spain as examples of the “climate emergency” that requires “intensified efforts.”
“Climate change is accelerating, its impacts are intensifying, becoming more frequent, longer-lasting, and with a greater territorial reach,” Aagesen stated. “We are talking about heat waves, wildfires, droughts, floods, hurricanes—impacts that many of us here, and our countries, have suffered,” she continued.
“In Spain, we have also experienced the harshest effects of climate change this past year: a DANA storm that devastated Valencia and the wildfires that ravaged the Iberian Peninsula this summer. These are different effects in different regions, but they share a common threat,” she noted.
“We are facing a climate emergency, which is a health, social, and security crisis exacerbated in recent years by the exponential rise of denialism, disinformation, and attacks on science,” the Vice President warned.
“We need to intensify our efforts, pursue climate action with powerful synergies, and adopt a climate agenda that is also an agenda for public health, social justice, prosperity, human rights, and peace,” she affirmed. “This is what we are doing in Spain, investing in renewables, energy efficiency, adaptation plans, and a just transition, leaving no one behind, and ensuring that this transformation also brings us closer to true gender equality,” she added.
“I encourage us to work together on implementing this agenda, which is an agenda of opportunities, and that the Belém COP will allow us to address the ambition gaps by implementing adaptation and mitigation policies, mobilizing financial resources on the necessary scale, and keeping the 1.5-degree target alive,” he stated. “Let us move forward with this prosperity agenda. We must do so out of responsibility, conviction, and opportunity. You can count on Spain,” he concluded.
Pedro Sánchez
On November 6, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced, during the COP30 summit of Heads of State and Government, a new Spanish contribution of 45 million euros to “climate multilateralism,” which will be distributed among the Adaptation Fund, the Loss and Damage Response Fund, and the Financial Mechanism for Systematic Observations of the World Meteorological Organization.
In his speech, Sánchez also recalled that “Spain, in the last twelve months, has experienced many climate emergencies, floods, a terrible DANA storm, fires and unprecedented heat waves, and in the last decade, the emergency has already claimed more than 20,000 lives in our country.”
The Prime Minister championed the State Pact to address the Climate Emergency, formulated by the Government in September, and defended the need to move forward “on three priorities of this COP”: mitigation, “because we have to agree on how we are going to achieve our greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets (after the European Union committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent by 2040), adaptation, and financing.”
“What we hope is that, in the coming weeks, and the Third Vice President and Minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge will be present to help achieve this agreement, the Baku-Belém Roadmap will be adopted” so that the “so-called New Collective Quantified Target” of $300 billion annually to support climate action in developing countries can be met globally, he stated at the press conference.
