Nueva Canarias-Bloque Canarista (NC-bc) wants to express its discomfort at what they consider "a new neglect" by the government groups of Coalición Canaria (CC) and Partido Popular (PP) at the municipal, island and autonomous levels. The formation denounces that they have not carried out "any action in the area of Climate Shelters."
The Canaristas recall that in September 2024 a Non-Law Proposal (PNL) was approved in the Parliament of the Canary Islands, presented and defended by the deputy Yoné Caraballo, which urged the Government of the Canary Islands to "implement a network of public and air-conditioned Climate Shelters in order to ensure the Canary Island population the availability of spaces to spend the days of heat waves."
For the political formation, “the public administrations have had a year to design and implement a basic network of Climate Shelters that functions as protection against the heat waves that we are suffering these days.” They recall, thus, “that there are many families in the neighborhoods and towns of Lanzarote and the Canary Islands who cannot afford to have air conditioning at home, or even enroll their sons and daughters in summer workshops or camps and are forced to be in their homes and in their urban environment all summer.”
“The data is eloquent. While in the peninsula the number of homes with air conditioning is around 43 percent, in the Canary Islands it does not reach 13 percent,” comment the Canaristas, who insist that “this data corroborates that the majority of Canary Island families have to fight inside and outside their homes with high temperatures and with hardly any capacity to mitigate it.”
“We must think that climate justice is today an imperative necessity, since it is evident that the climate we knew is no longer such. The heat waves are being more extensive and extreme, while our houses and neighborhoods lack the slightest adaptation,” comment from the organization, which recall that “the responses to heat waves have a social class component, since it is the popular and humble areas that lack green spaces and conditioned public infrastructures, in addition to the fact that their neighbors maintain jobs more exposed to the elements.”
For all this, from NC-bc they demand that public administrations take adaptation to climate change seriously and begin by designing a network of Climate Shelters in all the neighborhoods and towns of the islands, adapting existing public infrastructures.
