Madrid – The Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, has announced that Spain will demand at the Environment Council on November 4 to preserve the “roadmap” towards net zero emissions by 2050 –a goal included in the European Green Deal and the European Climate Law–, as well as the milestones for 2035 and 2040.
“If we move away from that roadmap, the first ones to lose will be us,” he pointed out during his speech at the opening of the event ‘Horizon COP30. Global push for a green, circular, and competitive economy’ organized by Ecoembes.
This Council is the last opportunity for the European Union (EU) to finalize a target for emission reductions for 2040 (and thus be able to present the one for 2035) before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2025, which officially starts on the 10th in Belém (Brazil) following the Leaders’ Summit on the 6th and 7th.
So far, Brussels is one of the signatories of the Paris Agreement that has not yet presented this target for 2035 despite the various extensions granted by the Summit organization. In this regard, Morán also emphasized that Spain will go to Belém defending the need to respect the Paris Agreement and implement the roadmap that has been applied since 2015, the year this international pact was signed.
In general terms, he stressed that according to Eurostat figures, the majority of Europeans (70%) and Spaniards (80%) demand “decisive” action from their governments against climate change and questioned “how is it possible” that executives are moving away from this citizen demand. For this reason, he criticized that the EU has entered into a “crazy dynamic of review,” among other things, of climate regulations.
The EU will be left out of the game board
“We have been a region capable of translating growth in rights in line with economic development. If to compete we have to give up the former, I fear we will be left out of the game board,” he warned.
Beyond that, he lamented that some countries seem to operate “more comfortably in the spaces of imperialism” and called to “save multilateralism.” Finally, he defended the State Pact Against the Climate Emergency. “It is especially about Spain expressing in the forums we participate in that there is a large social movement demanding action. And for this to be the case, it must have information about what is happening and the costs of inaction,” he indicated. (October 30)
