The 400,000 hectares of forest devastated in Spain by last summer’s forest fires were one of the worst global climate disasters of the entire year 2025, according to the annual report carried out by the Christian Aid organization: “One of its most devastating fire seasons”.
Spain has been included for several years in the ranking of the most serious climate impacts carried out by Christian Aid. In 2024, it was the damage that hit Valencia in particular that was considered one of the costliest disasters and in 2023, the drought.
Wildfires, drought and floods – the trident of the new climate normal that global warming has brought to Spain – demonstrate the country’s high degree of vulnerability to the climate crisis, despite the slowdown in green policies generated by international and Spanish right-wing and far-right neo-negationism.
These disasters are not “natural”. They are the predictable result of continued fossil fuel expansion and policy backwardness.
Joanna Haigh.
— Professor Emeritus at Imperial College London
“These disasters are not natural“, explains Joanna Haigh, professor emeritus at Imperial College London. “They are the predictable result of the continued expansion of fossil fuels and political delay,” believes this lead author from the UN Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Among these violent events, the report indicates other fires, in this case those which devastated the Los Angeles region (United States) in January 2025, as the most costly in economic terms of the course: more than 60 billion dollars and 31 people died directly and 400 others indirectly.
Also highlighted are the cyclones that hit Southeast Asia in November with 25 billion losses and more than 1,700 lives, last summer’s floods in China, Hurricane Melissa that devastated the Caribbean and the drought that hit Brazil.
No region of the world has been spared from very serious impacts. Typhoons in the Philippines, Cyclone Alfred in Australia, Garance in Reunion Island have spread disasters to all continents. The climate crisis is a total crisis.
In this way, a calendar and a map are created which, for each course, reflect how climate change is not a simple projection of the future, but an already present reality. Indeed, “the economic impact of disasters is measurable: 28,000 billion dollars between 1990 and 2020”, recalls this report. But, “despite growing scientific evidence of the harm caused by continued reliance on fossil fuels, the world continues on a path of consuming these fuels,” the book concludes.
A path that the main producers of oil, coal and gas want to take to increase their production (and their sale) of these products. Fossil fuels we are still stuck with, as the last Climate Summit in Brazil showed.
The most precarious are those who suffer the most
“This year has shown us, once again, the harsh reality of climate collapse,” said Patrick Watt, CEO of Christian Aid. “These disasters warn us of what awaits us if we do not accelerate the abandonment of fossil fuels,” he continues. And he concludes: “The suffering caused by this crisis is a political option driven by decisions to continue burning fossil fuels which end up affecting the most precarious first and hardest. »
The burning of these fossils increases the layer of greenhouse gases that warms the planet and collapses the climate as humanity has known it. The accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere continues to grow unchecked, as measurements from the World Meteorological Organization have shown in 2025.
One caveat that Christian Aid includes in its outlook for 2025 is that when it attributes economic damage, its view is limited to areas where there is insurance that values destroyed assets. “That’s why some of the worst disasters in poor countries don’t make the economic list, but they were just as devastating and affected millions of people. » In addition, these countries are those that have contributed the least to climate change because their historical CO₂ emissions are very low.
As an example of these extreme episodes, the document recalls that Nigeria suffered a major flood last May and the Congo another in April. “Drought in Iran and West Asia threatens ten million people with possible mass evacuation due to lack of water,” they add.
This year, even “very unusual” episodes were observed that caused climate change due to the greenhouse effect of CO₂ accumulated in the atmosphere due to emissions. The book highlights that in Scotland, an unprecedented heatwave caused wildfires in the Highlands, which burned 47,000 hectares. In Japan, they faced a year with unprecedented snowstorms and record temperatures.
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