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), ensuring that climate change “kills.” That’s how forceful he began, referring to what he called “the biggest natural disaster in our history,” he said, referring to the DANA that devastated Valencia. “It has contributed to the death of more than 220 of my compatriots,” he said. For this reason, he justified his presence in the Azeri capital and his absence at the Government Control Session in Congress “to prevent another tragedy from occurring” like the one in 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 adverse phenomenon that occurred in Valencia, there is another thing of equal importance and that is “to prevent it from occurring again.” For this reason, he encouraged his interlocutors present in the room and world leaders to work “so that natural disasters do not repeat or multiply.”
Sánchez insisted in his speech that according to the first investigations, the human and material losses caused by DANA as it passed 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 aimed to “act”, because otherwise “in the near future our countries will suffer more droughts, more heat waves, more fires and diseases. And many economic sectors will collapse“Hundreds of cities and towns will become uninhabitable and rising seas and thermometers will make life practically impossible in those locations.”
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 necessary to avoid the worsening of climate change. “Baku must be remembered as the moment in which we transformed words into figures,” he said, alluding to the objective of this high-level diplomatic meeting in which they will discuss who will pay for and how the ecological transition of the least developed countries.
In this sense, he asserted that what comes out of this 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 President of the Government came this year with a much more moderate speech, compared to the “Whoever pollutes, pays” that he gave at last year’s summit in Dubai, where he proposed global climate taxation with taxes that are levied on those who pollute the planet the most. .
What he did appeal to were 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 affected areas.
During his two interventions at this climate summit throughout the day, he recalled that Spain “has turned the ecological transition into a source of modernization and prosperity in recent years.” Likewise, he said that the country reduced its greenhouse emissions and consumption of natural resources by 40%. Nor did he miss the opportunity to remember that our country “is the OECD economy that has grown the most and has created the most jobs,” although the experts from the multilateral entity itself emphasize in their reports that it is thanks to the better performance of services, tourism and domestic demand.
In this sense, the IMF stressed in its latest report that this growth is “reflected by subsidies and loans from the EU Recovery and Resilience Mechanism.” In this sense, in their Article IV on Spain they already talked about how private investment will benefit “from the good execution” of these funds, which will boost growth, along with rising domestic demand and a savings rate of households that “will gradually normalize” as wage income “continues to increase steadily.”
In his speeches, the president recalled that “Spain is going beyond” its objectives and said that in 2023, “two years ahead of schedule”, all targets were surpassed by mobilizing “1.4 billion euros for climate financing.” .
In his opinion, “sustainable development and the fight against climate change are two sides of the same coin,” he argued, which is why he has asked that COP29 be a “platform for ambitious changes” and has referred to the summit of finance for development, which will be held in Seville in the summer of 2025
Regarding the future, the president reiterated that “Spain will comply” and that they will continue transforming the country so that before 2050 Spanish society “is carbon neutral.” But he regretted that “it will be of little use if some of us do it and not all of us,” so he asked all countries to act.
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