Spain, among the nations in Europe most affected by desertification, will set up a climate change research institute in the northeastern city of Zaragoza, Environment Minister Elena Espinosa said over the weekend.
"Its main goal will be to promote the analysis and research of climate change in Spain," she told a news conference, adding the institute would also recommend measures which Spain could adopt to fight the phenomena.
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Spain will also plant 45 million trees – roughly one for every resident of the country – between 2009 and 2012 at a cost of €90 million euros ($125.5 million) as part of a reforestation drive, the minister added.
Zaragoza has been the sight of the three-month 2008 World Expo which wraps up on Sunday and whose theme was "Water and Sustainable Development".
More than five million people attended the fair, Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa de la Vega said.
"It is a very satisfactory result, above expectations," she said at the same news conference attended by Espinosa held after a weekly cabinet meeting.
Nearly one-third of Spain's roughly 200,000 square miles faces a "significant risk" of desertification, according to the Spanish environment ministry.
While Spain's socialist government has identified climate change as a problem that needs to be tackled, the leader of the opposition conservative Popular Party, Mariano Rajoy, has openly questioned whether it exists.
"How can anyone say what will happen to the world in 300 years?" he said last year when former US vice president Al Gore visited Spain to highlight the dangers of climate change.
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