Benidorm rises to the challenge of commitment to the climate

BENIDORM has produced a pioneering plan to assist in slowing down climate change.

This makes it Spain’s first municipality with a 50,000-plus population to create a Climate Change Adaption Plan (PACC) for coping with the inexorable rise in temperatures and increasingly frequent periods of torrential rain and flooding.

Benidorm mayor, Toni Perez and Jorge Olcina, professor of Regional Geographic Analysis at Alicante University, presented the document to the media on April 13.

Perez and Olcina described the PACC as a roadmap which shows the direction that municipal action should take.  This is vital if it is to achieve its objectives of preventing human action from harming the planet and lessening the effects of climate change on the land, the economy and society, they stressed.

“At the end of 2019, Benidorm accepted a challenge from Jorge Olcina who recommended that cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants should develop a plan that could help them deal with climate change,” Perez said.

The plan diagnoses the present situation, foresees the risks and situations facing each sector while defining the actions and procedures to be adopted in the short and medium term, the mayor explained.

“With this document, Benidorm is developing its own action plan, ahead of regional directives,” he added.

Professor Olcina announced that all involved hoped that Benidorm’s PACC would be an example which would spur other Valencian Community towns and cities into following suit.

“There can be no going back, and the longer municipalities take to understand this, the worse it will be for them,” Olcina warned.