In Vaud, tackling the heatwave means rejecting the 12% initiative

The summer ending in Vaud broke heat records again. Heatwaves followed one another, rain was scarce and forest fires surged. The canton’s heatwave response system, designed mainly to protect vulnerable people, was activated four times, but it could not prevent excess deaths linked to the heat.

The effects reached beyond people. Alpine pastures ran out of water, livestock cullings rose sharply and harvests were catastrophic. Across Europe, more than 500,000 hectares of forest burned during the summer.

Against this reality, Rebecca Joly argues that the answer cannot be a tax cut proposed by business groups. In her view, the reduction would benefit people who pay the most taxes and who, statistically, also produce the most pollution. Everyone else would then have to bear the cost.

Joly, a member of Vaud’s parliament and president of the canton’s Greens, calls instead for action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and adapt living spaces to the heat. Her argument is that the region cannot respond to worsening heat by making the public pay for policies that do not reverse the trend.