the government is launching work on adaptation to a presumed warming of 2° C or 4° C

The Agly river, near Caramany in the south of France, on February 23. RAYMOND ROIG / AFP

Plus 4°C. This is the global warming scenario that the Minister for Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion, Christophe Béchu, chose to highlight to present the first “ministerial steering committee on adaptation to climate change”, which took place on Thursday 23 February. “Preparing our country for 4°C means anticipating a lot of changeshad declared Christophe Béchu, the day before on Franceinfo. At 4°C, two-thirds of ski resorts will lack snow in the Alps, (…) we will have five times more drought, (…) days of much more intense heat wave. »

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To initiate the reflection, the Minister therefore brought together the central directorates of his ministry, including energy and climate, that of risk prevention, but also the agencies and operators concerned by work on the climate, Météo France, the Environment and Energy Management Agency, the Center for Studies and Expertise on Risks, the Environment, Mobility and Planning, the National Geographic Institute.

On the table, two trajectories for which it is essential to prepare the country, dictated by the forecasts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report: a warming of 2°C or 4°C (compared to the pre-industrial era) for France, which would mean, in the first case, respecting the objective of the Paris agreement and, in the second, exceeding it in a context of “unchanged policy”. In fact, these 4°C for France correspond to the global average of 3°C of warming in one of the IPCC scenarios. Knowing that the rise in the planetary thermometer has already reached 1.2°C, and 1.7°C for France.

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Building a new strategy

This strategy should allow“harmonize all public adaptation policies in order to prevent the environmental, social and economic risks incurred in each territory”, says the ministry. The two scenarios studied must be put out for consultation in the spring and will serve as a basis for the development of the third national plan for adaptation to climate change (PNACC), expected no later than 2024. This work on adaptation is not new. In 2018, the first PNACC was adopted, followed seven years later by a second.

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Without renouncing the mitigation policies that aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, already at work in public policies, according to the Minister, the challenge is to build a new strategy. This first meeting of the steering committee worked on the basis of a report from the General Inspectorate for the Environment and Sustainable Development (Igedd) submitted on Thursday, mainly aimed at comparing adaptation strategies in eight countries (Germany , Austria, Canada, Spain, Japan, Netherlands, United Kingdom and Switzerland). In this report, commissioned by the Minister for Ecological Transition Barbara Pompili in April 2022, the inspectors write that they have “identified methods common to most of the countries studied, as well as good practices by which some of them stand out”.

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