{"id":94565,"date":"2025-08-19T15:04:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T15:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/94565\/"},"modified":"2025-08-19T15:04:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T15:04:07","slug":"deadly-wildfires-show-spain-must-better-prepare-for-climate-crises-says-sanchez-spain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/94565\/","title":{"rendered":"Deadly wildfires show Spain must better prepare for climate crises, says S\u00e1nchez | Spain"},"content":{"rendered":"

The wildfires that have devoured<\/a> 382,000 hectares of land in Spain and killed four people underscore the need to \u201creadjust and recalibrate\u201d the country\u2019s preparation and response capacities as part of a non-partisan effort to tackle the impacts of the climate emergency, the prime minister has warned.<\/p>\n

Speaking during a visit to the south-western region of Extremadura on Tuesday, Pedro S\u00e1nchez<\/a> said that while the record-breaking 16-day heatwave that had fanned the flames was over, \u201cdifficult hours\u201d lay ahead as firefighters continued to battle huge blazes across parts of the country.<\/p>\n

Wildfires in Spain<\/a><\/p>\n

The prime minister said the wildfires \u2013 and last year\u2019s disastrous floods in the eastern region of Valencia<\/a> \u2013 were clear proof that the climate emergency was hitting Spain harder and harder each year.<\/p>\n

According to Spain\u2019s Carlos III public health institute, 1,149 excess deaths across the country between 3 August and 18 August are likely to have been linked to the heatwave.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to prepare and be better equipped with mechanisms and tools so that we can mitigate the effects of these climate emergencies when they happen,\u201d said S\u00e1nchez. \u201cThe climate emergency is getting worse and more recurrent each year, and the effects of that emergency are accelerating each year.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said that when he had spoken to people affected by the fires, they had told him that they expected a non-ideological approach to the climate emergency that went beyond four-year governmental terms.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor all the scientific predictions about how the climate emergency would apparently evolve, we\u2019re seeing that it\u2019s getting worse and hitting much harder each year, particularly across the Iberian peninsula,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need to readjust and recalibrate both our response and prevention capacities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The prime minister, who has already called for a \u201cstate pact\u201d to address the climate emergency<\/a>, said he would outline his plan early next month.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the climate emergency is getting worse each year, we need to move beyond legislatures and turn climate emergency policies into state policies that bind all our institutions and all those that govern,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The response to the wildfires across many of Spain\u2019s self-governing regions has been beset with familiar political arguments. The opposition conservative People\u2019s party (PP) has accused S\u00e1nchez of touting the pact as a means to deflect criticism of what it claims has been his poor handling of the crisis.<\/p>\n

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\u201cState pacts don\u2019t put out the flames, nor do they restore what\u2019s been lost,\u201d a PP spokesperson said on Monday. \u201cPeople were expecting a lot more than a smokescreen designed to save his reputation after he\u2019d gone missing for a week.\u201d<\/p>\n

The PP\u2019s leader, Alberto N\u00fa\u00f1ez Feij\u00f3o, said the prime minister had ignored repeated calls for more troops to be sent to the hardest-hit areas and had failed to invest sufficiently in prevention.<\/p>\n

\u201cS\u00e1nchez\u2019s duty is to send help, not to skimp and always improvise,\u201d he said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Police in Spain have arrested 32 people for suspected arson since 1 June, while 93 others are under investigation, according to the interior ministry.<\/p>\n

Thousands of firefighters are still tackling blazes in neighbouring Portugal, where wildfires have claimed two lives and burned about 235,000 hectares of land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The wildfires that have devoured 382,000 hectares of land in Spain and killed four people underscore the need…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-94565","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}