Political
cowardice hindering Europe’s climate efforts, says EU’s green chief
Teresa
Ribera says effects of crisis are becoming increasingly obvious but not
translating into proper action
Sam Jones in
Seville
Wed 2 Jul
2025 05.00 BST
Political
cowardice is hindering European efforts to face up to the effects of the
climate crisis, even as the continent is pummelled by a record-breaking
heatwave, the EU’s green transition chief has warned.
In an
interview with the Guardian, Teresa Ribera said that although the effects of
the climate emergency were becoming increasingly obvious, they were still not
translating into proper action.
“When you
see the map of Europe, it’s dreadful,” said Ribera, speaking amid a heatwave
with unprecedented June temperatures from Spain and Portugal to the UK.
“We saw it
in [the southern Spanish province of] Huelva, where it was 46C on Saturday.
It’s 36C in Brussels and 38C in the east. They are absolutely terrible
temperatures that have a very serious impact on ecosystems, on the economy and
on health. And I think that there hasn’t yet been a real shift from the
headlines about extreme meteorological phenomena to preparing people and
understanding what needs to be done in the case of certain events.”
Speaking
alongside Jessika Roswall, the EU commissioner for environment, water
resilience and a competitive circular economy, Ribera said there was still a
long way to go when it came to readying infrastructures and urban environments
for the realities of the emergency.
A major part
of the problem, she added, was that some political parties “continue to insist,
quite vehemently, that climate change does not exist”, or else say that taking
decisions to adapt to environmental realities is too expensive.
Teresa
Ribera: ‘You can’t tell people that climate change is the great existential
problem of our generation, and then say, “I’m sorry, we’re not going to do
anything”’.
“Sorry, but
it’ll be much more expensive if we don’t act,” said Ribera, the executive
vice-president of the European Commission for clean, just and competitive
transition and a former Spanish environment minister. “We all know that. You
can’t tell people that climate change is the great existential problem of our
generation, and then say, ‘I’m sorry, we’re not going to do anything’. That is
what they are doing. And I think people see that, when it’s 46C in Huelva [in
June]. That is not normal.”
Equally
abnormal, she added, were last October’s torrential rains that caused the
deadly floods that killed 229 people in the eastern Spanish region of Valencia.
“These are
not isolated episodes,” she said. “But we are still in an ‘anecdotal’ phase –
and that is very worrying. So I believe that yes, there still needs to be a
coherent response.”
Ribera said
many politicians were reluctant to stick their necks out or demand action for
fear of alienating voters – something that was unhealthy and potentially
dangerous for democracy.
“I think
it’s a mistake to think that we have to hide the difficulties or that the
problems will be solved by the market,” she said. “We don’t have to hide the
difficulties, we have to understand them and manage them so that they are not
so difficult. Often, political courage is needed to understand that there is a
difficulty, and that instead of being small, you have to be big and find the
solution shared by everyone. You need to face it with honesty.”
She added
that denial – or a failure to deal with the difficult issues implicit in the
climate emergency – would only contribute to the existing lack of trust in the
political classes.
Many
far-right parties in Europe and beyond treat the climate crisis as part of the
culture wars. Spain’s Vox party is seeking to repeal the socialist-led
government’s climate change and energy transition law and is pushing for
greater reliance on nuclear power, while the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor
Orbán, has described EU plans to tackle climate breakdown as a “utopian
fantasy” that would only push up energy prices.
But Ribera
said political consensus could be reached, pointing to the landmark €1.4bn deal
struck last year between the Spanish government and the Andalucían regional
authorities to protect the Doñana wetlands, which are one of Europe’s most
important, and most threatened, carbon sinks.
Roswall, who
was in Spain to visit the Doñana with Ribera, said one of the key challenges in
preparing for the new climate reality was changing the way people consider, and
use, water. Given the rising temperatures and droughts, she added, water needed
to be seen, more than ever, as a vital and strategic resource. The commission
recently published a strategy designed to restore and protect the water cycle
and create “a sustainable, resilient, smart and competitive water economy”
across Europe.
“When we
talk about security – me and all of us – of course it’s not only guns and tanks
and things, it’s also the nature that is protecting us,” she said. “It can be
water, it can be borders … Investing in nature is also a security issue.”
The
commissioner stressed the importance of water when it came to food production,
energy generation and even the digital industries, which rely on big
datacentres that use significant amounts of water. She also said areas such as
the Doñana played a vital role in preventing fires and mitigating the effects
of the climate emergency.
“[Water] is
important for all of us,” she said. “It’s not only security, but it’s also our
economy, which is also security, so everything is linked. But … I will say that
we have taken water for granted too long. We have just counted that it will be
here. We have not thought about it as a resource that is finite.”
As one of
the most southerly countries on the fastest-warming continent, Spain is already
feeling the effects of the climate emergency amid creeping desertification and
record temperatures. The 46C recorded in Huelva last weekend was not far off
Spain’s all-time record of 47.4C, recorded in another Andalucían town, Montoro,
in August 2021.
Spain’s
state meteorological agency, Aemet, said on Tuesday that June 2025 had “smashed
records”, with an average temperature of 23.6C, 0.8C above the previous hottest
June in 2017.
The monthly
average was also 3.5C higher than the average over the period from 1991 to
2020, it said.
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