MADRID (AFP) – Thousands marched through Madrid on Sunday to demand that the Spanish government adopt concrete measures to fight climate change, organisers said.
“We demand a law against climate change that calls for an increase in the use of renewable energy and that favours saving energy,” Raquel Monton, a spokeswoman for the Spanish branch of Greenpeace, told Cadena Ser radio.
Greenpeace was one of about 40 green groups that backed the protest in the Spanish capital, two days before World Earth Day.
Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who was re-elected last month with a slightly bigger majority, has made the environment a priority of his second term.
Under the 1997 Kyoo protocol on global warming, Spain and the 14 pre-enlargement members of the European Union agreed to reduce their CO2 emissions eight percent from 1990 by 2012.
But unofficial estimates put Spain’s emissions at 53 percent above the 1990 level — one of the biggest increases of any Kyoto signatory.
