Both the Press and experts have succumbed to the association of the Valencia tragedy with climate change. It is said that the catastrophe has been caused by him and that because of him, there will be many more and more frequent ones in the future. Vice President Yolanda Díaz has said on TVE that what happened is further proof that we are facing a “climate emergency.” The climate on Earth has been changing since before we, the chosen species, set foot on it. That is undeniable. And I do not deny that there may be human influence in some recent climate phenomena, but I do not subscribe to the arrogance of believing that we master all the keys to what is happening. Humanity believed for a long time that the Earth was flat. The truth is that the Valencia tragedy has much more to do with the development of urbanism than with climate change. The question is simple: we have always had bad weather throughout history. In fact there was a similar flood in 1957. But what produces catastrophes today is that we have taken cities to places where they were not before. The case of Valencia is also exemplary. We are talking about a flood zone formed by orchards and an old lagoon (today a lagoon) that has been populated by 490,000 people. Today, 56.8% of the world’s population lives in cities. Cities cover only a small part of the Earth, but that proportion has doubled in the last forty years, as has the number of cities, according to a 2021 study by Lewis Dijkstra and six other experts. Furthermore, cities have expanded rapidly and densities are higher than half a century ago. The European Union has funded the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) project, which produces global spatial information on the human presence on the planet over time, in the form of population maps, population density maps and settlement maps. This information is generated with heterogeneous data, including the Copernicus satellite system, to which evidence-based analysis and knowledge are applied using new data mining technologies. This database allows us to appreciate that 7.3 billion people live in the 7.6% of the earth’s surface and that built-up areas have increased 2.5 times since 1975, imposing urbanizing pressure on natural environments that are increasingly difficult to preserve. The attribution of the tragedy to climate change is not innocent. Yolanda Díaz knows well what she means. The objective is to build a scenario in which to justify, with a climate emergency, compulsive measures on the entire population, when in reality what should be promoted is responsible urban planning at the level of town councils: that no buildings are built in flood-prone areas, that urban planning do not devour good agricultural land, do not build in ravines and streams, and do not expose human life more than necessary.
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