The Guardian view on climate-related disasters: Spanish tragedy won’t be the last

TThe death toll from flooding in the Spanish region of Valencia has passed 200. A major clean-up operation is underway in desperate conditions, with severe weather warnings still in force. The storms that caused this devastation – turning roads into muddy rivers, flooding thousands of homes and sending cars into piles – were unprecedented. The have a friaor “cold drop”, occurs regularly when cold autumn air moves over the warm Mediterranean Sea, creating dense clouds. But this rain was ten times stronger than a normal downpour, according to the Spanish weather service.

Extreme weather in Spain and the rest of southern Europe is usually seen as dangerous heat, drought and forest fires. The regional government is under attack for the lack of sufficient warning and there is no doubt that the severity of these floods came as a terrible shock.

But in another sense, the events of the past week are part of a pattern. While the destruction is unprecedented, climate scientists’ analysis is well known. It takes time to produce peer-reviewed attribution studies that use computer models to determine the impact of global warming on specific events. But the head of the World Weather Attribution project said initial calculations suggest rising temperatures make this week’s flooding twice as likely. Another scientist, Stefano Materia, said the reduced absorption capacity of parched earth means droughts and floods should be seen as two sides of the same coin. Like Hurricane Helene, which caused chaos and killed more than 220 people in the southeastern US in September, and Storm Boris, which caused severe flooding in central Europe, the Spanish Flood is evidence of the devastation caused by climate instability.

This week also brought more hopeful news. EU greenhouse gas emissions will have fallen by 8% in 2023, making them 37% below 1990 levels thanks to the boom in renewables. But the worrying lack of progress at the UN biodiversity summit in Colombia, combined with warnings about the likely impact of a Trump victory on global environmental negotiations, means expectations for this month’s climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, are not high are. The fact that the host country is about to expand gas production, while energy giants Shell and BP are both scaling back green investments, points to a political climate of resurgent denial.

The Cop biodiversity process, which runs in parallel with the Cop climate talks, has never gained more momentum, despite the crucial importance of protecting nature – including forests and oceans – and how this relates to the climate threat. Despite the framework agreed in Montreal two years ago, most countries do not even have an action plan beyond their emissions targets. Much of the discussion in Colombia has focused on the financing of poorer countries and the role of government subsidies for environmentally damaging industries.

In Spain, a large majority of the public recognizes the threat of climate change and supports policies to tackle it. There, as in much of the world, catastrophic weather events that were once considered ‘natural disasters’ are now rightly seen as climate disasters. There is an urgent need for policies that support people and places to adapt to increased risks. Clear and timely warnings and recovery plans are part of this. But reducing the threat of dangerous weather, such as that which hit eastern, southern and central Spain this week, remains the biggest political challenge.

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