Spain's wildfire crisis demands a national climate pact. The scale of destruction across Madrid, Ávila, Castellón and Toledo proves that prevention, emergency response and reconstruction must be treated as a unified national priority. Declaring disaster-zone status is a necessary first step, but a binding state agreement on the climate emergency is the only real path forward.
Sánchez proclaims his climate pact "imperative," yet the means he promised months ago remain unbought, unbuilt, or unused. He arrives by official helicopter to announce urgency, all while the concrete tools to prevent such climate catastrophe sit untouched. This pledge is too little too late for an administration that failed to put climate at the top of the agenda sooner.
Collapsed power lines, misused machinery and deliberate human action sparked these fires, and measures to address climate change will not prevent them in future. Decades of neglect in forest management, bureaucratic barriers that effectively ban livestock grazing and gutted firefighting budgets did the rest. The government must slash red tape, restore rural land use and increase fire prevention investment, instead of recycling climate talking points.
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