How should France adapt to climate change?

How to prepare for a France at +4°C in 2100? We are then talking about more frequent and more intense extreme climatic events (heat waves, heavy rains, floods, etc.), like the recent events in the Valencia region in Spain, the scale and probability of which are reinforced by global warming.

Our country has its first climate displaced people, particularly in Hauts de France, but we could also talk about coastal erosion, the extreme drought of the eastern Pyrenees, and these cracks which threaten millions of houses built on clay soils. .. As COP 29 opens and Spain is still searching for nearly 80 missing people in the Valencia region, how can we adapt to climate change?

Adaptation to climate change has two components: Crisis management and anticipation.

For crisis management, you must be ready to dispatch help and organize the reaction of residents. For anticipation, the question is a little more complicated: How can we reduce the vulnerabilities of the future while preparing for extreme events? Benoit Leguet talks about reflex adaptation : any investment must be considered through the prism of climate change.

What level of risk are we prepared to accept?

Before determining a national adaptation strategy, a crucial question must be answered: What level of risk are we prepared to accept? For a commune in Pas de Calais for example, are we ready to have our feet in the water once a year? Once a month? Every 10 years? Or for the Electric Transmission Networks (RTE), are we ready to accept cuts of a few minutes per year, a few days, etc.
Only an answer to these questions will give us the strategy that we must put in place, by building more or less infrastructure, by providing crisis management with more or less substantial resources…

Where are we in terms of adapting water management, agriculture and building construction? What can we anticipate and already plan? If you live in vulnerable areas, tell us what happened to you and what you are trying to change on an individual level.

Speak up in The phone rings in the presence of Benoit Leguetdirector of the Institute of Economics for Climate (I4CE) and member of the High Council for Climate, Emma Hazizahydrologist and specialist in the adaptation of our societies to climate change and François Decostermayor of Saint-Omer, commissioned by Emmanuel Macron to find solutions to avoid new devastating floods in the municipalities.