‘Climate change kills’: Pedro Sánchez speaks plain truth to Spain’s deniers

PM has long history of speaking out on realities of global heating but political opponents remain unnmoved

Just over four years ago, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, visited a small town in the south-western region of Extremadura that had been affected by one of the wildfires devouring tens of thousands of hectares of land across the country.

That summer’s blazes had left two people dead in the northern region of Castilla y León and another man there fatally burned after the excavator he was using to try to dig a firebreak to protect his town was swallowed up by the flames. A street-sweeper in Madrid had collapsed and died from heatstroke while on shift in soaring temperatures that summer. The paramedics who tried to save him noted that his body temperature was 41.6C (107F).

“I want to make something very clear,” the prime minister told reporters in Extremadura that day in 2022. “Climate change kills: it kills people, as we’ve seen; it also kills our ecosystem, our biodiversity, and it also destroys the things we as a society hold dear – our houses, our businesses, our livestock.”

Earlier this week – amid wildfires that have consumed more than 180,000 hectares (428,915 acres) of land in the first seven months of 2026 – he repeated the same blunt warning.

“The climate emergency kills,” he said on Monday. “And that’s why it’s not enough to address the consequences, which we do; what we have to do is reduce its causes, anticipate its effects, and, consequently, better prepare our country to protect people’s lives.”

Just as he has been one of the most vociferous European leaders when it comes to criticising Israel’s conduct in Gaza and Donald Trump’s war in Iran - and defending the benefits of immigration – so Sánchez has long deployed unvarnished language to raise awareness of the climate emergency.

On the face of it, that may come as little surprise: as a country on the southern frontier of the world’s fastest-heating continent, Spain is becoming increasingly vulnerable to the effects of the climate emergency, be they droughts, desertification, erratic weather patterns, heavy rains or wildfires.

Awareness, and perhaps personal experience, of the growing scale of the crisis is increasingly common. According to a survey published in December 2024 by Spain’s state research institute, the Centre for Research Studies, 84% of Spaniards see the climate emergency as “a real threat to human wellbeing and to the health of the planet”.

Despite the floods and the fires, however, there is little political common ground, and opposition parties have rejected Sánchez’s plans for a “state pact” to prepare Spain for the climate emergency.

On Monday, Spain’s conservative People’s party (PP) accused the government of using the “mantra” of climate crisis to mask its “poor management” of natural disasters.

As well as claiming the Sánchez administration had seized on the climate emergency as a wedge issue, the PP’s spokesperson, Ester Muñoz, appeared to question the notion of a human-driven climate crisis.

“That the climate changes is something that has occurred throughout the history of humanity and the Earth – that’s obvious,” she said. “Now how do we humans act in the face of things that change?”

The PP’s record on the climate crisis and emergency response is, to put it mildly, mixed. When floods hit Valencia at the end of October 2024, its PP regional president – who eventually resigned – was having a three-hour lunch with a journalist and did not arrive at the response centre until the early evening, by which time many people had drowned in their homes, garages and cars.

Unlike her erstwhile Valencian counterpart, the PP president of the Madrid region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has been quick to ask the central government to step in and assume overall control of the wildfire response. But Ayuso, a rightwing populist, has questioned the scientific basis of the climate emergency and claimed it is an “agenda” pushed by “lobbies” and “communists”.

Her views are reminiscent of those held by the far-right Vox party, which is adamant that the current wildfires have nothing to do with the climate emergency and everything to do with a failure to clear rural areas of excess vegetation and to invest in firefighting services. The PP has forged a series of regional alliances with Vox, heralding a possible national coalition if it wins next year’s general election.

Experts and climate scientists say the blazes are down to a combination of factors: the abandonment of rural areas; an abundance of highly flammable, dry vegetation, and an increase in heatwaves driven by climate breakdown.

On Wednesday, a Vox MEP, Jorge Buxadé, attempted to push the party’s denial agenda by posting what purported to be an official air ministry document showing that temperatures of more than 44C had been recorded at observation stations around Spain as far back as the 1950s.

Spain’s state meteorological office, Aemet, responded on social media by pointing out that the document was a fake.

“We’ve reviewed the data, and all but one station’s data are false,” said Aemet. “If they were true, they wouldn’t deny climate change: there were heatwaves before, but now they’re more frequent and intense.”