Spain is urging the EU to introduce a permanent tax on oil and gas company profits to finance climate adaptation, according to a letter to climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra.
Madrid wants a dedicated adaptation fund, backed by common EU debt, to protect vulnerable member states from wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, and to strengthen shared resources like firefighting fleets.
The Spanish government has called on the European Union (EU) to tax oil and gas company profits to fund measures to adapt to climate change, the Financial Times (FT) has reported.
Madrid made the recommendations in a letter and policy paper, seen by FT, addressed to EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. He will deliver a new strategy on climate adaptation and resilience this autumn, according to the paper.
Spain’s minister for ecological transition (and third vice-president) Sara Aagesen Muñoz also called on the EU to establish a climate adaptation fund, financed by measures including the permanent levy on oil and gas profits and the issue of more common debt to help it fund protections from extreme events driven by climate change.
Aagesen Muñoz noted that many member states are highly exposed, as recent events have clearly demonstrated, referring to the wildfires and drought that have affected much of Europe this summer.
She added that the strategy should make Europe “capable of anticipating and collectively responding to climate risks” and “mobilising the resources needed to deliver the necessary investments”.
Madrid’s move follows separate calls for a pan-European tax on profits of oil and gas companies from the finance ministers of Germany, Austria, Italy, Portugal, Poland and Spain, in a letter last month.
The measure will be discussed at an informal gathering of finance ministers in Dublin on September 18 and 19.
“The European Commission has so far rejected pressure to impose windfall taxes on oil and gas companies benefiting from the present energy crisis, despite doing so following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Officials have said that member states could bring in their own national schemes if they wished to do so, and Portugal has introduced a 33 per cent tax on extraordinary profits made in 2026. Oil and gas industry executives have spent this year trying to rebuff the calls for fresh windfall taxes, even as they announced record profits after the Iran war sent prices soaring,” the FT report noted.
According to the newspaper, Aagesen Muñoz has also called on climate risks to be integrated into infrastructure design so that new projects are resistant to climate change, as well as also supporting existing EU plans to improve shared resources for tackling extreme weather by increasing the EU’s fleet of firefighting planes and other reserves.