This article is reposted with permission from the rs21 website
Adam Cogan analyses the politics of Portugal’s “natural” disasters, where the dead and displaced reveal not a failure of prediction but a war declared by fossil capital. A warning for Britain, where millions of unprepared homes face a similar fate due to government inaction.
This article draws from the contents and structure of a newsletter (link) written by Climáximo in Portuguese, it was translated and rewritten with their permission.
There are numbers governments like to announce. GDP growth. Investor confidence. Renewable energy targets pencilled in for 2050. And then there are the numbers they’d rather you didn’t dwell on for too long – the ones that don’t make the opening slide of the press conference, that get buried in civil protection bulletins and regional hospital admissions data, that require a bit of excavation to assemble into a picture that accurately reflects what actually happened.
The Portuguese ecosocialist organisation Climáximo has done that work. What they reveal is ugly.
Sixteen people have died from storm-related incidents since late January. One of them a worker killed repairing damaged electrical infrastructure – dying, in other words, cleaning up a ‘natural’ disaster that was really anything but. Nearly 1,000 people were treated for physical trauma at a single hospital in Leiria. Around 45,000 homes without electricity. Fifteen thousand people without water in Torres Vedras. Seven thousand more in Arruda dos Vinhos. In Coimbra, the possibility of the Mondego levees bursting prompted the preventive evacuation of 3,000 people – a risk that was then confirmed when two levees ruptured in less than 24 hours, with warnings remaining in place for a further 9,000 in the urban network. A total of 12,467 civil protection incidents nationally since February began. Sixty-three roads were prohibited or restricted in Aveiro alone. In Almada, 48 residents were evacuated from Porto Brandão. Thirty-one more were forced out of Costa da Caparica by landslides. In Salvaterra de Magos, the rising Tagus left 200 animals stranded, with firefighters diverting to ensure they were fed.
The damage isn’t only to homes and infrastructure. A total of 120 museums, monuments, and churches have been affected across 20 municipalities. Twenty-one theatres and cinemas. This matters not because cultural heritage outweighs human displacement – it obviously doesn’t – but because it completes the picture of a society absorbing damage on every level simultaneously, in ways that will take a long time to properly calculate and longer to repair.
The government’s response has been to declare a situation of calamity in 68 municipalities and contingency in 48 more. This is the administrative vocabulary of crisis management – the language of a state reacting rather than one that ever seriously attempted to prepare. Portugal has not been blindsided by the existence of climate risk. The science has been clear, the projections have been available, and the specific vulnerabilities of its river systems, its coastal areas, its ageing infrastructure, have been documented. The political choice to maintain fossil fuel dependence while gesturing towards transition has been made consciously, repeatedly, and with full awareness of what it means for the country’s exposure to exactly this kind of event. The floods aren’t a failure of prediction. They’re the predictable result of a certain set of choices.
Climáximo’s framing of all this is worth taking seriously: these numbers, they write, are the result of the war declared by governments and businesses against everything we love. A precise description of a situation in which the costs of fossil capital’s continued operation are being systematically transferred onto working-class communities, onto the elderly, onto renters without the resources to absorb repeated disruption, onto workers sent out into dangerous conditions to repair damage that will happen again next season.
In the weeks since the storms, Climáximo have been in the affected areas, rather than observing it from Lisbon – taking donations, helping with clean-up, and crucially listening to people living through this daily. Their politics are practical as well as structural: mutual aid now, and an uncompromising demand for systemic change alongside it. Their slogan – ‘only the people save the people’ – isn’t a counsel of despair about the state. It’s an accurate description of where solidarity actually materialises in a crisis, and a political argument about where power needs to be built for the longer fight.
They’re also clear-eyed about what happens next. Heavy rain slows, the news cycle moves on, and what was viscerally immediate to thousands of people in evacuation centres gets quietly filed under ‘extreme weather event’ – a phrase practically purpose-built to drain political content from situations that are saturated with it. The specific danger isn’t just forgetting. It’s normalisation. Another February, another sixty-odd municipalities in calamity, another government that helped create the conditions expressing solemn solidarity with those suffering them. If that rhythm becomes routine, it becomes very difficult to break.
There’s a further set of numbers that definitely won’t make the press conference. Climáximo’s legal team maintains what they call a Repression Counter – a running tally of sanctions handed to activists who participated in direct actions for climate justice. The current figures: 238 months of suspended prison sentences. A total of 5,500 hours of community service. Over 28,000 euros in fines, compensation, and court costs. These are the outcomes of concluded cases only – the pipeline of ongoing prosecutions is longer.
The same state apparatus that cannot maintain functioning levees on a river system it has had decades to prepare, that leaves tens of thousands without water or electricity in a storm, that sends a worker to his death fixing infrastructure that failed – that state has found consistent institutional energy to pursue, prosecute, and sanction the very people trying to stop things getting worse. The inversion is not incidental. It reflects whose interests the legal system is organised around, and whose it isn’t.
Climáximo’s legal team is also tracking the broader European context: what they describe as the rise of authoritarianism and the normalisation of repression as tools for maintaining a collapsed system. Portugal isn’t an outlier here. Across the continent, climate activists are facing increasingly aggressive prosecution, civil injunctions, and in some cases imprisonment, as states respond to the failure of their own climate commitments by criminalising those demanding they be honoured. This is the other side of the greenwashing coin – the warm language about transition and net zero on one face, the riot police and the court summons on the other.
On March 9th – the day Portugal’s new president took office – Climáximo and others called students, workers, and retirees onto the streets to demand an end to fossil fuels by 2030. The date was deliberate. A president assuming a mandate that runs to 2030 should be confronted, on the very first day of that mandate, with what the deadline actually requires. Not targets. Not frameworks. An end to fossil fuels, in a country that has just watched what continued dependence on them costs in human terms.
Climáximo also point to the International Court of Justice’s recent landmark opinion on climate justice, which strengthens the legal accountability of states for inaction – a development their legal team has written about in detail. The architecture of climate accountability is slowly being built, both in the streets and in international law. The question is whether it’s being built fast enough, and whether the political will to enforce it can be generated before the damage becomes irreversible.
The floods in Portugal are not a warning of things to come. They’re already here. The question isn’t whether the climate crisis will affect working-class communities in Europe – it’s already doing so, these past weeks, in the evacuation centres and the hospital wards and the homes that waited days for the water to come back on. The question is whether we treat each disaster as an isolated weather event to be managed and forgotten, or as political facts that accumulate into an argument about power, and about who bears the costs of political decisions they were never consulted on.
In the UK, 6.3 million homes are at risk of flooding, with the majority of households reporting they are unprepared for flooding. At the same time, natural flood defences have been consistently eroded due to environmental degradation and government inaction on climate adaptation, meaning it is only a matter of time before disaster strikes. In Portugal, Climáximo’s answer is organised resistance. It’s our duty as ecosocialists to join in their struggle.
Climáximo are continuing their solidarity and support actions in affected areas. Follow them, share their work, and consider contributing to their organisation.
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