Fires: Sánchez proposes national pact to tackle climate emergency

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez promised today to provide all necessary resources to autonomous communities to extinguish the fires ravaging the country and proposed a "broad state pact to mitigate the climate emergency."

Speaking to the press after visiting areas affected by forest fires in Ourense, the governor stressed that firefighting capabilities must be improved due to the worsening effects of the climate crisis.

The leader of the executive, who was accompanied by the President of the Galician Junta, Alfonso Rueda, and the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, noted that the pact he proposes involves all public administrations, but also parliamentary groups, companies, unions and all of civil society, putting aside "partisan struggles and ideological issues."

After the flames are extinguished and reconstruction begins, he stressed, a thorough reflection on a strategy that provides a better and more guaranteed response will be necessary.

Sánchez added that Spain is a state in which each administration has its own responsibilities, to which each must respond in a coordinated manner, and he committed to having the foundations of the proposed pact ready by September.

The goal, he explained, is to equip public officials with all the necessary skills not only when fires occur, but also beforehand, so they can respond “much more effectively” and with greater guarantees than currently possible.

The pact is in line with what your Government has been doing over the last eight years, with measures, some legislative, that have allowed for "a very rapid response" to the situations experienced.

"In any case, we also need to look at the capabilities of other autonomous communities and, of course, integrate them into a European Civil Protection mechanism," he said.

Regarding this mechanism, he thanked countries such as Germany, France, Italy, Slovakia and the Netherlands for their solidarity in sending equipment and brigades to fight the ongoing fires.