Agricultural Groups Call on Spanish Government to Step Up Climate Change Response

The Coordinator of Agriculture and Livestock Organizations (COAG), a farm­ers’ union, has admon­ished the Spanish gov­ern­ment for reduc­ing fund­ing for agri­cul­tural insur­ance in its December 2023 bud­get, a sig­nif­i­cant tool used to fight the effects of cli­mate change.

“The Ministry of Agriculture has turned a deaf ear to the requests of the sec­tor and, ignor­ing the effects of cli­mate change in the coun­try­side, has cut 21 per­cent in the insur­ance bud­get for 2024, going from €358 mil­lion in 2023 to the scarce €284 mil­lion for the new year,” said Pedro García, COAG’s head of agri­cul­tural insur­ance.

Although Decree-Law 8/2023 adopts some mea­sures to alle­vi­ate the effects of drought, crit­ics said it has not taken into account the impor­tance of agri­cul­tural insur­ance as the pri­mary risk man­age­ment tool for farm­ers and ranch­ers.

According to Juan Vilar, chief exec­u­tive of olive oil and agri­cul­tural con­sul­tancy Vilcon, the gov­ern­ment should focus more on address­ing the cur­rent cli­mate cri­sis.

“The cur­rent cli­mate sit­u­a­tion is very dif­fer­ent from before due to its increas­ing impact on olive oil pro­duc­tion,” he told Olive Oil Times. ​“If the weather does­n’t change, olive oil prices will con­tinue to rise.”

In Spain, extra vir­gin olive oil prices at ori­gin hit record highs of €8.988 per kilo­gram, a 68 per­cent increase com­pared to last year, accord­ing to Infaoliva’s price obser­va­tory.

Overall, accord­ing to the European Commission, olive oil prices have risen 75 per­cent across the European Union since January 2021.

Meanwhile, data from Spain’s State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) show a mas­sive increase in heat­waves in Spain since 2015.

For exam­ple, Spain expe­ri­enced an unprece­dented 41 days of extreme heat between June and September 2022. In 2023, there were four sig­nif­i­cant heat­waves in suc­ces­sion, total­ing 24 days. According to Aemet, most of Spain only had rain in June.

“This year will be the longest and dri­est, accord­ing to mete­o­rol­o­gists and inter­na­tional agen­cies, such as NASA,” Vilar said. ​“However, it will likely rain a lot in spring here in Spain. According to weather fore­casts, we can expect 200 liters of rain per square meter. If that occurs, we can expect a har­vest of 1.3 to 1.4 mil­lion tons of pro­duc­tion in Spain for the next sea­son.”

“With the cur­rent cli­mate being unusu­ally warm for win­ter, at 16 ºC in January, this is ter­ri­ble for the trees, which mis­take the cur­rent weather for spring,” he added. ​“As a result, these trees are already flow­er­ing. If the weather now turns and tem­per­a­tures drop, the fruit could die. This phe­nom­e­non is called mete­oropa­thy, where a change in the weather does not align with the nat­ural rhythm of the envi­ron­ment.”

Vilar argued that Spain has plen­ti­ful water resources, and the gov­ern­ment must invest in bet­ter pro­tect­ing and uti­liz­ing them for agri­cul­ture and domes­tic con­sump­tion.

“We need arti­fi­cial lakes, reser­voirs, desali­na­tion plants for sea­wa­ter, and a way to clean up black water from the cities to improve water avail­abil­ity for agri­cul­ture and human con­sump­tion,” he said. ​“The gov­ern­ment needs to do more to improve the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion.”

This includes defin­ing spe­cific strate­gies for each region, where water needs and avail­abil­ity dif­fer, and one uni­form plan would fail to meet spe­cific needs.

“We have to think about sus­tain­able strate­gies,” Vilar said. ​“The gov­ern­ment is defin­ing poli­cies to improve the sit­u­a­tion but needs to cre­ate infra­struc­ture, a proper struc­ture with prac­ti­cal steps. This takes invest­ment and mit­i­ga­tion through insur­ance, which is already long over­due.”

In July 2023, Maria José Caballero, the head of rapid response at Greenpeace Spain, warned that Spain is get­ting hot­ter.

“Projections indi­cate that if Spain does not severely cut the emis­sions that cause global warm­ing, the coun­try will become hot­ter, drier, more arid and fire-prone,” she said.

While the Spanish Sustainability Observatory also noted that Spain achieved a sig­nif­i­cant five per­cent reduc­tion in its green­house gas emis­sions in 2023, ana­lysts are call­ing for more prac­ti­cal steps against the threat of cli­mate change.

Cristina Bernal Aparicio, a dis­as­ter and risk man­age­ment expert, noted that ​“reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions is no longer enough to reduce the effects of cli­mate change.”

She added that ​“the base for cli­mate change adap­ta­tion in Spain is not enough” and that the coun­try is ​“not ready for future haz­ards and the impacts of cli­mate change,” cit­ing a 2019 report on local cli­mate change poli­cies that found less than 30 per­cent of munic­i­pal gov­ern­ments – home to 60 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion – have made cli­mate change adap­ta­tion plans.

“It is dif­fi­cult because the local com­mu­nity needs a lot of money to cope with envi­ron­men­tal changes,” Vilar said. ​“Local farm­ers need gov­ern­ment back­ing. Without gov­ern­ment sup­port, there is no way to mit­i­gate the impact of the cli­mate cri­sis.”

“The law is under the gov­ern­ment,” he added. ​“Local farm­ers can save water but can­not do any­thing else. They can­not cre­ate an arti­fi­cial lake or take water from the sea; it is too expen­sive.”

Insurance can play a pro­tec­tive role in mit­i­gat­ing the neg­a­tive macro­eco­nomic and wel­fare impact of cat­a­stro­phes and cli­mate change dis­as­ters, includ­ing flood­ing and drought, accord­ing to a 2021 study by the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA).

“Although around 30 to 35 per­cent of Spanish olive groves have irri­ga­tion, 65 per­cent do not,” Vilar said. ​“They do not have the infra­struc­ture for irri­ga­tion. The 35 per­cent that are irri­gated do not have enough water due to water scarcity. So, 100 per­cent of olive groves do not have water unless it rains.”

“In Spain, there is not enough water to live daily,” he added. ​“Seville [the Andalusian cap­i­tal], at the moment, has severe restric­tions. In Seville, these water restric­tions mean that water usage has been reduced to 21 per­cent in the south­ern part. Things will become more dif­fi­cult in the sum­mer, espe­cially if there is insuf­fi­cient rain in the spring.”

According to COAG, ” the dam­ages are greater, the guar­an­tees are lower, and the costs to the sec­tor are higher” due to the impacts of cli­mate change on Spain in the past few years.

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