After Valencia, the need to adapt and protect

Sirritating, terrifying, the waves of water coming from the sky which submerged the region of Valencia (Spain) in the evening and night of Tuesday October 29 to Wednesday October 30 took more than two hundred lives, according to a provisional report, and sown desolation over a vast urbanized area. Even if violent autumn storms are an old phenomenon in this Mediterranean region, the nightmare, with its homes invaded by thick mud and its vehicles submerged and tangled, is not an accident. The phenomenon that caused it is clearly identified: the cold drop, this isolated depression at high altitude, is amplified to the extreme due to the millions of tons of water with which the air is loaded due to the warming of ocean temperatures. .

The catastrophe that befell Spain is just the umpteenth warning to the world's inhabitants of the urgent need to stabilize global warming by achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Even in a Europe that has long felt spared, the improbable has become commonplace. Dantesque floods and storms have recently devastated Germany, Belgium and central Europe. In the last two months alone, four French departments have experienced terrible flooding.

But the rate of degradation is such that the fight against global warming can only slow it down. This must be supplemented by policies to adapt to an extremely problematic reality: urban sprawl in river valleys and the subdivision of agricultural land have restricted the potential for water flow. The priority is now to stop this artificialization, to take climate risks into account in all land use planning policies, but also to help people living in areas at risk, to improve warning and monitoring systems. 'insurance.

However, the shock of the Valencia disaster comes at a time of weakening of political ecology and decline in climate-related demands, in France as in many other countries. According to the study carried out for France by the NGO Parlons climat and analyzed by The Worldclimate skeptic tendencies arise less from a lack of knowledge than from a rejection of discourses perceived as threatening lifestyles and values. The acceleration of anti-warming policies generates reactions which cause setbacks.

Ironically, the third national plan for adaptation to climate change, which was unveiled by the Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, four days before the Valence disaster, saw its ambitions and resources reduced. Political leaders who are upset by the floods in Spain support the relaxation of the objective of zero net artificialization of land and the reduction of aid for the renovation of buildings and the purchase of electric vehicles.

Faced with the risk of increasing polarization of opinion, it is up to political leaders to find the words to show that the real punishment awaiting Europeans does not lie in ecological discourse, but in the consequences of backsliding in this area. . And that the deadly cycle which replaces oblivion with astonishment in the face of disasters must be replaced by joint and sustainable policies to combat global warming and adapt to ensure the protection of everyone.