As COP30 approaches, the Caribbean counts the cost of Hurricane Melissa and Spain marks one year since the flooding disaster in its eastern region of Valencia, the need for stronger climate resilience and more financing for climate adaptation has taken centre stage.

Experts told Climate Home News that last year’s destruction in Spain highlights a little considered problem that can put people at greater risk from increasingly heavy rains: an over-reliance on road transportation.

In late October 2024, a weather system known locally as the DANA killed 229 people and turned towns near Valencia into rivers of mud. In the days that followed, images of wrecked cars swept by floodwaters into piles as high as buildings circulated around the world.

It emerged that many of the victims had died while trying to rescue their cars from flooded garages. The disaster destroyed about 130,000 vehicles in the Valencia region and claimed another 800 that were never found.

Residents are now pushing local governments to consider climate change in rebuilding efforts and to rethink how people get around, to protect them better against future torrential rains.

Over the past year, survivors and victims’ relatives have fiercely criticised the Valencian regional government for only sending out warnings several hours after the floods started, when it was far too late to prepare and people were already drowning or missing. Carlos Mazon, Valencia’s right-wing leader, resigned on Monday over his handling of the crisis.

According to a group of researchers from the University of Valencia, the damage to vehicles and people’s attempts to salvage them reflect the central role played by cars and vans in many suburban areas of Spain, underscoring the urgent need to make sustainable mobility a key pillar of climate adaptation.

‘Crucial to daily life’

Josep Vicent Boira Maiques, a human geography professor at the University of Valencia who has studied the issue following the DANA floods, said building mobility systems that prioritise rail transport between municipalities could help reduce carbon emissions from petrol and diesel cars, and also avoid situations where piled-up vehicles hamper drainage or rescue of survivors.

The Valencia metro area – home to 2.5 million people – has five suburban train lines. Buses cover the rest of the region, but travelling between small towns on public transport can be a challenge.

“You cannot criticise the behaviour of people who died while trying to save their car from a garage without understanding that those people saw their car as a crucial element in their daily life,” Boira Maiques told Climate Home News.

The post-flood rebuilding process must be an occasion to strengthen climate adaptation, and mobility should be a big part of that, he believes.

“If we build back with the same territorial model and the same mobility model, which is a car-centric one, we can find ourselves again in similarly dangerous situations,” he added.

Josep Eliseu Pardo Pascual, professor of cartographic engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, built an interactive map showing how the water level rose as high as 3 metres during the floods. He said the high number of cars parked on roadsides and along riverbanks likely played a big role in this.

More dangerous rains

Maria Jimenez Collado, 45, was born and raised in Aldaia, a town of about 30,000 people a few kilometres west of Valencia. Growing up, she remembers seeing rain during the months of October and November, but not of the intensity experienced in 2024.

“It would rain for weeks, but slowly,” she said. “That way, the water was able to flow and didn’t destroy things the way it does now. The DANA [flooding] has given us a lot of information about what awaits us. We used to say that was the future, but it’s now the present.”

Jimenez Collado’s family home was flooded a year ago, and she is still living with her furniture and personal belongings piled up in her living room as she waits for the remaining humidity to dry out. Her family also lost two cars, and she was only recently able to buy a new one thanks to government aid.

While she had no car, Jimenez Collado would walk to places or take buses, which she said were often impossible to get on due to overcrowding.

Since she was little, the number of cars in the area has increased, she explained, because workplaces like factories and offices have moved to bigger towns – and while people can no longer walk to work, public transport hasn’t caught up.

Climate-friendly railways

Jimenez Collado is part of a group of citizens that is pushing the local government to consider climate change in the post-flood rebuilding process, and to retrofit existing infrastructure so as to cope better with future extreme weather events.

They are proposing, for example, a redesign of one of the existing rail lines that connect the city of Valencia – Spain’s third largest – to some of the surrounding towns.

According to a proposal the group is presenting to the Spanish infrastructure ministry, the old train line – which is also a CO2 emitter as it only supports diesel-powered trains – would be replaced with a tramway lined with cycling paths and green space.

Alejandro Gaita, a resident of Sedavì, another town that was flooded last year, has been gathering evidence and adaptation ideas to discuss with the government. He said the current train lines in the Valencia area can worsen flooding in nearby towns, because their high barriers and track underpinnings hold back water instead of letting it flow away.

“This has been causing us serious issues,” Gaita said. “We are asking either to put railways in tunnels, or to turn them into light rails.” The adaptation proposals from Gaita’s committee were included in a public consultation by the Spanish ecological transition ministry last summer.

Cost-effective for governments

To geographer Boira Maiques, this kind of intervention is more difficult when metropolitan areas have fragmented municipal governments, as is the case in Valencia and many other urban areas in Spain whose regions also have considerable autonomy from Madrid.

France, Germany and the UK, on the other hand, have more unified metropolitan governments and better integrated transport systems between towns.

In the German city of Hanover, a regional government was formed in recent decades that oversees public transport. Suburban trains connect the city with the surrounding towns and villages.

Urda Eichhorst, mobility and cities team lead at Germany’s GIZ development agency, said climate impact assessments and climate risk management must be mainstreamed into infrastructure planning processes – not least to keep costs down in the longer-term.

“Nothing is more expensive than not adapting to climate change,” Eichhorst told Climate Home News.

The missing piece in COP climate talks: Market signals for adaptation

A recent study from the World Resources Institute found that every dollar invested in climate resilience and adaptation generates more than $10 in benefits over a ten-year period.

The COP30 presidency recently said it expects “a major turning point” in adaptation at the upcoming climate summit in Brazil, adding that investing in adaptation can not only protect communities, but also bring major economic benefits and help tackle inequality.

For people living on the frontlines of climate change, as Jimenez Collado and other Valencia residents found out last year, concrete plans to adapt cannot come soon enough: “Someone has to listen to us,” she said. “Our lives are at stake.”

The post Car-driven climate risk: Valencia floods expose need for sustainable transport  appeared first on Climate Home News.

Car-driven climate risk: Valencia floods expose need for sustainable transport