The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, began his speech this Tuesday before the plenary session of the UN Climate Summit (COP29), which is being held these days in Baku (Azerbaijan), by affirming that climate change “kill”. That’s how forcefully he started, referring to what he called “the greatest natural disaster in our history,” he said, referring to the DANA that devastated Valencia. “This contributed to the deaths of more than 220 of my compatriots,” he said. It is for this reason that he justified his presence in the Azeri capital and his absence from the government control session in Congress “to prevent another tragedy from happening” like that of Valencia.
The head of the Spanish Executive reiterated that his presence at this event is due to the fact that in addition to helping those affected by this harmful phenomenon occurring in Valencia, there is another thing of equal importance, that is i.e. “prevent it from happening.” recurring.” It is for this reason that he encouraged his interlocutors in the room and world leaders to work “so that natural disasters do not recur or do not multiply”.
Sánchez insisted in his speech that, according to initial investigations, the human and material losses caused by the DANA during its passage through Valencia “would have been less intense” without the effect of climate change. “The planet is giving us increasingly clear signals,” he reiterated.
The socialist leader intended to “act”, because otherwise “in the near future, our countries will experience more droughts, more heat waves, more fires and diseases”. economic sectors will collapse“Hundreds of towns and villages will become uninhabitable and rising water levels and rising temperatures will make life virtually impossible in these places.”
Likewise, before going to the central amphitheater of COP29, Sánchez was present at the event The health argument for climate action where he reiterated that “ambition” is needed to avoid worsening climate change. “Baku should be remembered as the moment when we turned words into numbers,” he said, hinting at the goal of this high-level diplomatic meeting in which they will discuss who will pay and how the ecological transition of the least developed countries. .
In this sense, he affirmed that what would result United Nations Climate Summit “will measure our commitment to future generations.” In this sense, he called for “an international financial architecture capable of providing more financing and under better conditions”.
The prime minister delivered a much more moderate speech this year than the “He who pollutes pays” speech he delivered at last year’s summit in Dubai, where he proposed global climate taxation with taxes levied on those who pollute the environment. planet the most.
What he appealed to were the deniers of this phenomenon and “those who say that the ecological transition is incompatible with the well-being of nations or that it is bad for the middle classes”. He reiterated that if the sustainability of the economy is not achieved, the first to suffer the consequences are precisely “the middle and working classes”, because they are the population that has its resistance and its jobs in the most difficult areas. most affected.
During his two interventions throughout the day at this climate summit, he recalled that Spain “has made the ecological transition a source of modernization and prosperity in recent years”. Likewise, he said the country had reduced its greenhouse gas emissions and consumption of natural resources by 40%. He also did not miss the opportunity to recall that our country “is the OECD economy which has grown the most and which has created the most jobs”, even if the experts of the multilateral entity themselves emphasize in their reports that this is thanks to the better performance of services, tourism and domestic demand.
In this sense, the IMF highlighted in its latest report that this growth is reflected “by grants and loans from the EU Recovery and Resilience Mechanism”. In this sense, in their Article IV on Spain, they already spoke of how private investment would benefit “from the good execution” of these funds, which would stimulate growth, as well as the increase in domestic demand and a household savings rate that would “gradually normalize”. “since wage income “continues to increase steadily.”
In his speeches, the president recalled that “Spain goes beyond” its objectives and declared that in 2023, “two years ahead of schedule”, all objectives were exceeded by mobilizing “1.4 billion euros for climate financing.
According to him, “sustainable development and the fight against climate change are two sides of the same coin”, he argued, which is why he asked that COP29 be a “platform for ambitious changes » and mentioned the finance for development summit, which will be held in Seville in the summer of 2025
Regarding the future, the president reiterated that “Spain will comply” and that it will continue to transform the country so that before 2050 Spanish society “is carbon neutral.” But he regretted that “it would be no use if some of us did it and not all”, and therefore called on all countries to act.
