My friend Alicia was in Cádiz, Andalusia, when a large fire broke out near the urban area. She was evacuated from the campsite where she was staying and headed back home to Granada, a three-hour drive away.

A few weeks later, the fields around my family’s house in Granada caught alight. The flames were extinguished before they spread. What remains is a long black scar across the hillside, a reminder of both our luck and our fragility.

Several days passed. This time, a friend who was driving across Almería, also in Andalusia, sent me a video of flames flickering in the distance. “It’s unsettling,” he wrote. I also received messages from Madrid: “I have seen houses and gardens destroyed.” But the worst fires happened in Castilla y León and Galicia, in the northwestern part of Spain, where more than 141,000 and 130,000 hectares burned, respectively.

María, another friend of mine, sent photos from Riós, Galicia, where she spent August visiting family. Some were blurred with grey smoke, others washed in sepia by the orange glow of the flames. The images showed people bundled up to their eyebrows, clutching hoses and trying to push back the fire.

When María first arrived in Riós, the heatwave smothered any chance of outdoor activities, so she escaped to Vigo for a few days to cool off in the sea. On her return, she witnessed the first signs of a looming disaster: columns of smoke over the mountains and aircraft battling spreading wildfires. By the time she reached the village, she recalls, an enormous grey cloud loomed overhead, ash was falling, and the sky had turned a burning orange that lingered for weeks.

For eight chaotic days, fires raged and fear spread. Villagers and volunteers organised to fight the flames. They wore masks and tucked their pants into their socks. “I learned that xestas [broom shrubs, pulled straight from the hillside] are the best tool to put out flames,” María notes. She still remembers the jolt in her body at the thought of losing everything. Yet above all, she recalls a deep sense of abandonment. Cut off without electricity, internet, or phone signal, the villages were isolated as roads closed, and no aircraft appeared for days. “Everywhere you looked, there was the immediate threat of fire, yet no one explained to us what we should do,” she says. “It wasn’t until three days after the fires began that the first alert finally arrived on our phones, telling us not to leave the house”.

An explosive mix

María’s experience, though extreme, mirrors what many across Spain and Europe endured this past summer, as record heat and widespread wildfires swept through the continent.

2025 has been the worst year on record in terms of land burned across Europe. According to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), more than one million hectares have been scorched on the continent. Portugal suffered one of its three worst fire seasons on record, while Romania and southern Italy, despite seeing fewer fires compared to 2024, faced an increase in terms of area burned.

Spain was by far the hardest-hit EU country, with more than 400,000 hectares burned – nearly 40 per cent of the EU total. The 2025 season surpassed 2022, previously the worst year for Spanish fires since the mid-1990s. This summer was also the hottest ever recorded on the mainland, as reported by the Spanish Meteorological Agency.

At least eight people have died as a result of the fires. Emblematic local tree species have suffered severe damage, and wildlife has also been affected. The economy was also hit hard: the worst-impacted provinces experienced a decline in leisure and hospitality spending of 8 to 16 per cent.

The Mediterranean region is known for its hot and dry summers. The steep slopes that are typical of its landscapes also contribute to the rapid spread of wildfires. But climate change has greatly exacerbated the conditions for wildfires. According to a report by World Weather Attribution (WWA), human-induced climate change made the heat, dryness, and wind conditions that fuelled this summer’s blazes in Spain and Portugal up to 40 times more likely. In turn, the warming made the 10-day heatwave 200 times more probable and 3 degrees Celsius hotter.

The scale of the recent fires has also been driven by the dense vegetation accumulating in parts of Portugal and Spain – a buildup of biomass resulting from rural abandonment. Where forests go unmanaged, the risk of blazes steadily rises. “With fewer people and less traditional grazing, natural vegetation control has sharply declined,” the WWA report notes.

Luis Berbiela, director of Fundación Pau Costa, a global non-profit organisation dedicated to wildfire prevention and management through the lens of fire ecology, says rural abandonment in Spain is driven by an ageing population as well as by a decline in the consumption of forest-derived products, such as wood for heating and construction. Furthermore, second homes and recreational or tourist establishments have been introduced into these pristine areas, making fires ever more lethal. “Fires will inevitably become larger due to the continuity of vegetation; more intense because of the fuel density; and more dangerous due to the vulnerability of people living or vacationing in these areas,” he says. During this year’s crisis, the simultaneous occurrence of big fires in different parts of the country also played a big role, as it was impossible for emergency personnel to be everywhere at once.

The adaptation gap

When the fires broke out, María recalls, her grandmother told her that several people from the village had asked civil protection authorities back in winter to clear the branches around the area, but received no response. A sentence heard across Spain every summer is “Fires are extinguished in winter.” However, each summer, fires become more severe due to inadequate preventive management.

Across the globe, too, climate disasters are becoming more frequent and intense, yet climate adaptation remains largely absent. The United Nations Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report 2023 reveals that progress on climate adaptation is slowing across all fronts, attributing this slowdown to inadequate investment and planning, which leaves the world exposed to rising climate change impacts and risks.

Across the globe, climate disasters are becoming more frequent and intense, yet climate adaptation remains largely absent.

​​After the devastating 2022 wildfires, Fundación Pau Costa brought together over 55 experts, from conservationists and forest managers to shepherds and journalists, to build a technical consensus on effective wildfire management. The resulting document outlines key measures to transform how the country addresses wildfires, including revitalising rural communities, preparing for extreme future scenarios, and fostering shared governance and climate change adaptation.

“We have repeatedly issued warnings, but this risk culture has not been embraced at the political level,” Berbiela says. “A culture of risk is glaringly missing.” He mentions Japan as an example to learn from: “There isn’t a single Japanese child who hasn’t been taught how to behave on unstable terrain, nor a Japanese person who would consider buying a house without earthquake-resistant foundations. Resilience and resistance to earthquakes are built into the very cultural DNA of Japanese life.”

With climate change-driven disasters set to become more frequent in the future, what is stopping political leaders from adopting the measures needed to mitigate the damage?

Paralysed by polarisation

An article recently published in Nature concluded that today’s “marked social contestation threatens the speed, scale and viability of climate action implementation at the very time when societies cannot afford climate action to stall or fail.” Political divisions are often cited as obstacles to strong climate policy because they erode trust, reduce willingness to compromise, and make long-term planning harder. For climate policy to be inclusive and effective, cooperation across political parties, stakeholders, and levels of government is essential.

As Luis Miller, a research scientist at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), explains, “to achieve a public good, the most important thing is cooperation, both at the individual level and between administrations. Yet both in the case of the Valencia floods and this summer’s fires, we saw major coordination problems.”

This summer, in a show of solidarity, volunteers poured into fire-affected areas to help. In contrast, the central government (headed by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, PSOE), and regional administrations (mostly led by the centre-right People’s Party, PP) engaged in a blame game over political responsibilities. The PSOE accused the People’s Party of downplaying climate change, neglecting regional fire prevention policies, and rejecting a 2024 bill on forest firefighters that the PP claimed carried an “ecological and gender ideological bias”. In contrast, the conservatives largely attributed the wildfires to arson and criticised the central government for failing to deploy enough firefighters and additional forces, including the army.

This is not unique to Spanish politics. Italy witnessed a similar dynamic during the devastating floods that struck its northern regions this September. “All the unfortunate new events we are experiencing at the global level are being used by political parties, governments, and different administrations to polarise. The political landscape is increasingly fragmented, which makes this kind of confrontation easier,” explains Miller.

María recalls how frustrating it was this summer – whenever they had electricity and her grandmother would put on the TV – to see politicians play the blame game: “It felt like a slap in the face. People were burning their ankles, risking their health, putting out fires with branches and sticks, while the situation became a media debate. The whole thing was just about throwing mud from one political party to another on a talk show; it was absurd.”

Political polarisation has intensified across Europe since the 2008 financial crisis and has become a structural feature of European political systems. As noted in a 2025 study by the Bank of Spain, “In France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, public debate reflects increasingly deep ideological divides.” Politics has moved beyond the healthy disagreement and dissent that characterise democracy into an increasingly binary “us versus them” antagonism between ideological groups and parties, the report suggests.

Experts agree that polarisation is a top-down movement stemming from political elites. It starts with radicalisation or a movement towards the extremes of the political elites, which then manifests in the political stances of citizens. Disinformation is used to exacerbate disagreements. According to the Nature article, today’s polarisation is occurring against a backdrop of “post-truth” discourse, where “facts have lost their currency”.

As with last year’s floods in Valencia and the nationwide blackout earlier this year, online disinformation received widespread attention while fires burned through Spain. It ranged from claims that unaccompanied minor immigrants had started certain fires, to assertions that those behind the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development were using the wildfires to eliminate traditional activities like livestock farming. At the same time, there were claims alleging the blazes were intentionally started to enable land redevelopment, while some even put the blame on eucalyptus trees, distracting attention from factors like climate change and poor forest management.

But what is more concerning is that some prominent politicians peddled these false narratives. The leader of PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, even proposed the creation of a “national registry of arsonists”, which would use electronic bracelets to monitor people convicted of starting fires, even though official data shows that only 7.64 per cent of fires in 2023 were intentional.

Miller notes that political positions today are often marked by a high degree of strong rhetoric, with some parties more prone to disinformation than others, even to the point of opposing scientific consensus. “The far right across Europe defends positions that run counter to the broader social consensus by denying climate change,” the researcher explains. He adds that the deliberate undermining of science, which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change classified as disinformation in its 2022 report, contributes to “misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent”.

In parliaments and in political commissions, this hysterical environment makes reaching the consensus necessary for effective climate adaptation nearly impossible because even the roots of the problem are contested. “The real problem with fake news and exaggeration in politics is that they spark debate over the very definition of the issue; for example, the causes of fires. And we end up arguing about what causes these problems, rather than relying on technical expertise and proposing political solutions,” concludes Miller.

The hysterical [political] environment makes reaching the consensus necessary for effective climate adaptation nearly impossible because even the roots of the problem are contested. “

This carries consequences. A recent report co-authored by the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the International University of Valencia (VIU) found that misinformation during the Valencia floods had worsened the emergency and undermined institutional trust. Three out of four false claims were created intentionally, combining far-right rhetoric with messages traditionally associated with the Left, such as criticism of institutional power or elites. This was done with the aim of exploiting uncertainty and reinforcing distrust in the government, scientific organisations, and NGOs.

During both the Valencia floods and the 2025 wildfires in Spain, the slogan “solo el pueblo salva el pueblo” (“only the people save the people”) gained widespread traction, reflecting both the remarkable solidarity among citizens and their deep frustration with political institutions. This grassroots mobilisation, though a powerful display of civic responsibility, also highlighted a vicious cycle of distrust. As citizens witness institutional inaction, they rely more on themselves, which simultaneously reinforces scepticism toward authorities and weakens confidence in governance. Moreover, the slogan was co-opted by conservative and far-right groups as a weapon against the welfare state, with the message that “the state would not save you.”

American environmentalist David Orr, who edited the collection of essays Democracy in a Hotter Time, argues that the influence of corporations on policymaking is partly responsible for the failure to adapt to climate change. Fossil fuels companies and tech giants like Meta, Orr maintains, are especially to blame: “They have done a great job at confusing people and have indeed moved fast and broken a lot of things”, says Orr.

The case for democracy

Policy failures, disinformation, and political blame games in the aftermath of climate disasters all contribute to a decline of trust in democracy. In many parts of the world, satisfaction with democracy is alarmingly low, in particular among Gen Z and younger generations. A YouGov survey conducted for the TUI Foundation across seven European countries found that one in five young Europeans aged 16 to 26 would support an authoritarian government “under certain circumstances”.

Polarisation is a healthy component of any democracy, but only as long as it does not erode trust and institutional capacity to act. “When facing common challenges (economic recovery, energy transition, social cohesion), it is crucial that political pluralism does not devolve into political paralysis,” writes the Bank of Spain.

Interestingly, one of the main causes of this scepticism towards democracy is that 36 per cent of Europeans do not feel their interests are well represented in their national parliaments. Orr explains that the problem with today’s democracy is that we are still living in a model that was built on the French and American example. “There are a number of features we would have to make to take democracy to the next step. One is that you can’t run democracy for long as an oligarchy. The other steps to make our democracy resilient to change have to do with honouring the rights of future generations and other species, and landforms,” he adds. “We need to have a different relationship with time. We can’t keep thinking in terms of the next election cycle, we now have to begin to think in terms of centuries.”

The alternative is deadly and mirrors what we are already beginning to experience. Ecological economics professor Julia Steinberger uses the term “climate necropolitics” to describe how those in power neglect the fact that we live in death-inducing conditions: “Every year the angel of climate death swoops down lower and lower over our houses. It’s a waiting and suffering game. This year, I think my family will survive the heat wave. Next year? The one after that? (…) It’s only a matter of time before we see the flames of forest fire crawling over our formerly green hills, coming down to smoke up our valley,” she writes.

Global warming is set to increase the pressure on democratic systems: rising temperatures and dwindling resources will make consensus harder to achieve. “Civilisation requires certain things such as tolerance, foresight, equity, competence in government. Qualities that we often take for granted. Once you turn up the thermostat, everything changes,” warns Orr.

Despite divisions, finding common ground is not impossible. Even in the highly polarised United States, Orr notes, many people who identify as right-wing still agree on basic needs: protection from climate chaos, a fair share of economic resources, and security for their families. Beneath the noise of ideology, people converge on the basic desire for security, fairness, and stability. If there is a source of optimism, it lies in the realisation that we are all connected.    

As my friend María wrote to me, “In the village, people condemned the politicians’ inability to take responsibility, yet they appreciated the help and time of their neighbours, because it was all they had.” Those in power should do their part too – before it’s too late.