The question arises at a particularly demanding time for the country. In recent weeks, intense storms have caused floods, landslides and significant damage, causing deaths and affecting entire communities. These events require serious reflection on the way we deal with risks that are now widely known.
Denying climate change is ignoring widely consolidated scientific consensus and turning a blind eye to evidence accumulated over decades. Climate science works with data, models and projections that consistently show an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. These signals are clear, reiterated and have direct implications for public, economic and social action.
Portugal finds itself in a particularly exposed position. The combination of changes in precipitation patterns, increased average temperatures, water stress and greater atmospheric instability creates conditions conducive to severe events. The recent storms were not an unpredictable fluke. They are part of a well-known and widely studied trend. When this trend intersects with inappropriate spatial planning, vulnerable infrastructure and delayed responses, the impacts inevitably become more serious.
The central problem is not discussing whether climate change exists, but understanding why available scientific knowledge continues to be insufficiently integrated into the definition of public policies.
The State has a primary responsibility here. Incorporating science means planning based on evidence, updating planning instruments, investing in adaptation, strengthening civil protection and assessing risks before deciding. Sustainability has become a structural condition of governance.
The private sector is not immune to this reality. Companies that ignore scientific evidence expose supply chains, assets, workers and investments to increasingly frequent shocks. Integrating scientific knowledge into management is not environmental activism. It is risk assessment, value protection and economic viability.
This challenge does not only apply to States and companies. People also directly feel the costs of non-sustainability, whether through physical risks, loss of income, deterioration of housing or increased cost of living.
And the third sector plays an essential role, supporting vulnerable communities, promoting scientific literacy and exercising informed scrutiny over public and private decisions.
The argument of economic and financial costs, which has served to postpone decisions on sustainability, becomes inconsistent when the price of non-sustainability, including destruction of infrastructure, loss of economic activity, increased public expenditure and worsening of risk premiums, will tend to exceed, in a shorter horizon than is often admitted, the costs associated with mitigation and adaptation. What for years was treated as an environmental cost becomes an accumulated financial risk.
It is important, however, to recognize that many companies and people do not have the financial capacity to invest individually in adaptation. This is precisely why sustainability must be treated as a systemic risk and not as an individual choice, requiring collective responses, robust public policies and social protection mechanisms.
Ignoring science is never rational. It’s accepting avoidable risks and transferring costs to the future. In a context of increasingly frequent extreme environmental phenomena, treating sustainability as a systemic risk is no longer an option and persisting in inaction is not skepticism. It’s negligence.
Guest professor UCP/UNL/UÉ
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