When weather events as extreme as the DANA which last week especially hit the Country Valenciahe climate change and the need to confront it reappear at the forefront of the political and media agenda. However, this effect usually fades after a few weeks or, at most, a few months, without the medium and long-term political responses necessarily being aligned with adaptation to the situation. climate emergency. The question is whether this will be repeated after a storm that has caused hundreds of deaths or if this time we will experience a turning point.
At the outset, it is worth highlighting that despite the denialist speeches propagated largely by the extreme right, there is a notable citizen consensus on the seriousness and importance of climate change. So, for example, It is surveyed by the Òmnibus Generalitat of Catalonia published last week by Center d’Estudis d’Opinió (CEO) shows how Catalans consider that climate change is the “main problem of the world in 10 years“. Specifically, it accumulates 28% of responses, clearly above the 19% of the second option, which is poverty, inequalities and social problems. And the volume is clearly higher among voters of the CUP, Common, CKD and even Together.
In parallel, according to the Climate Barometer of Catalonia of 2023, also carried out by the CEO, 86% of Catalans are convinced that the planet’s climate is changing due to the climate crisis, while 69% believe that the consequences of climate change “will be very serious”, 17% goes further and thinks that “it will make humanity disappear” and only 2% believe that “nothing will happen.” Now, despite the forcefulness of these data, the Parliamentary elections of May 12 meant a strong setback in the parties with clearer measures to confront climate change, such as CKD, Common and the CUP and, instead, an improvement of PSC, Together and PPparties that do not question the current socioeconomic model.
The distance between concern for the climate and the vote
When explaining this fact, the energy and climate researcher at Observatori del Deute en la Globalització (ODG) Alfons Perez points out that “one thing is to recognize that there is a global problem and another thing is to take concrete measures.” And in this sense he adds that we have “a welfare society that is closely based on a socioeconomic model that causes” climate change, which in part explains the vote choice.
For the biologist specialized in Ecology and Social and Solidarity Economy Eva Vilaseca “There are many layers” that can explain this electoral behavior and one is that “we see climate change as a very big thing, but sometimes a little distant and we do not see how it affects us on a daily basis, unless there are events like drought, a DANA or a big fire. Vilaseca, who is also a member of the Catalan Assembly for the Ecosocial Transitionadds to this that “the problem is that there are no real and winning political proposals in the face of the climate crisis either.”
According to her, climate change “is not politicized, they have emptied it of content”, since we have accumulated decades during which “they have transferred it to a very politically correct sphere that does not challenge many economic and political powers.” However, Vilaseca clarifies that “it is true that moments of crisis” like this, which will increase in the future, “can further politicize the climate issue” and bring to the surface “discontents that already exist today.”
Organization to influence
Now, for this to have an impact at the political and electoral level, Vilaseca considers it necessary that “there are organized social movements” that can take advantage of these “moments of crisis and awareness” to “put pressure on the institutions.” “Now people are sensitized, but environmentalism needs to be organized and able to influence the story, we need to be clear about what our proposals are and organize our responses to be able to have an impact,” he details. However, she regrets that for her “Right now there is no winning party that lives up to what the climate crisis demands“.
Alfons Perezof the ODGbelieves that episodes like the current DANA can “polarize” at the electoral level and that “there is a certain awareness in a part of the population, which votes more for parties that want to confront climate change”, but at the same time “denialist speeches also penetrate of the extreme right”. In any case, he does consider that in the Catalan case “there may be greater citizen pressure against macroprojects such as the expansion of the Prat airport or the complex hard rock“. And he emphasizes that this pressure can come both “because of the environmental factor, and because of the public investment they imply, which is questioned and would have to be channeled towards other issues, such as mitigation or adaptation to climate change.”
Emissions reduction
For Eva Vilaseca, “Catalonia would need a clearly environmentalist Government today that would take the climate emergency seriously and as a first priority, but no one is proposing this.” In this sense, she is convinced that “if this were proposed, there is a very great predisposition among the population” to support it and advocates articulating “exciting political proposals for a change of model, which involve planning our economy in a different way“. In the short term, like Pérez, he considers that “the absurdity of expanding the Prat airport should be stopped,” because “there is no social consensus” to enlarge the infrastructure and “with DANA it is absolutely suicidal to propose it.”
Finally, Pérez comments that to prepare for future damages or other phenomena that climate change will aggravate “greater planning is needed to adapt” and this “involves tough measures at the level of infrastructure, but also in issues such as the industrial model, very based on automobiles and agribusiness, which would have to change. In addition, he advocates exploring “public-community collaboration” as a way to respond to extreme phenomena: “If we believe it is an emergency situation, the population has to be trained to respond and there are experiences in the global south where with much fewer resources we find very powerful community responses.
Vilaseca, in turn, proposes everything from “very basic measures that could be done now”, such as “stopping the urban planning plans that are now in flood-prone areas”, to the “reduction of emissions, which is an issue that is just as urgent or more urgent and that entails changing our economic model. “This involves rethinking our economy and there will be sectors that will have to decrease, such as tourism or macro farms and this is a very big job, but it is the only possibility that there is a future in the new climate context“, he concludes.
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