Climate disasters compete with wars, markets for distracted world’s money

Capital is finite, as is political bandwidth and public concern. So far, this year has asked all three to stretch further than usual, split between security spending, market volatility and now simultaneous disasters unfolding on opposite ends of the planet. Climate change did not wait for global crises to subside. It forced its way onto the front page anyway.

Last week supplied the clearest illustration yet. In southern Spain, a wildfire near Almeria killed at least 12 people and left 23 more missing, one of the deadliest fires in the country’s history. Some victims tried to outrun the flames along roads that turned into traps. It followed Spain seeing its hottest June days ever recorded, part of a blistering summer that has Europe on track for another brutal wildfire season after 2025 became the European Union’s worst on record, with more than a million hectares (2.5 million acres) burned.

On the other side of the planet, floods told the same story in a different register. Typhoon Bavi forced the evacuation of about 2.2 million people in Zhejiang province alone, days after it had killed at least 17 people in landslides across the southern Philippines and injured more than 130 people in Taiwan on its way there.

In the coastal city of Yueqing in Zhejiang province, more than 1,300 trees fell and over 700 of those were uprooted entirely. Bavi was the second typhoon to make landfall in China in just over a week, arriving after Typhoon Maysak struck the country’s south on July 3.

Fire on one side of the world, floods on the other, arriving within days of each other. That is not a coincidence of timing so much as a description of what a warming planet now looks like most weeks.

The harder question is what happens when disasters like these have to compete for a finite amount of money and attention. That is the essence of what analysts have started calling a polycrisis: not one emergency but several of them arriving at once, each with a legitimate claim on the same limited pool of capital.