The climate crisis offers no respite. This week, part of France is affected by violent hailstorms and intense rainfall. Last week, she was suffocating under a heat wave exceptional in its intensity and precocity. At the beginning of June, other bad weather had hit three quarters of the territory, causing nearly 1 billion euros in damage. While the consequences of climate change will continue to worsen, it is urgent to adapt to a changing climate, in other words to prevent and minimize its deleterious effects. However, France is not ready and does not devote enough funding to it, warns the Institute of Economics for the Climate (I4CE).
The think tank publishes, Thursday, June 23, the first assessment of public financial needs for adaptation to climate change in France, the result of a year of work. “Without this knowledge of needs, it is difficult to put in place a coordinated and effective policy”, explains Vivian Dépoues, adaptation project manager at I4CE, one of the authors of the report. Now, today, adaptation in France, which remains a “secondary subject”is above all, according to him, reactive, partial and suffers from many blind spots. “We don’t anticipate and we lack strategic vision”, he assures. The expert points to the government’s announcement of a 500 million euro city renaturation fund in the midst of the heat wave on June 14, or the emergency release of a support plan for a billion euros to help farmers affected by severe frost in spring 2021.
The I4CE lists eighteen essential measures, representing an additional budget of at least 2.3 billion euros per year, which can be taken immediately to prepare France for climate change or reinforce adaptation measures already in place. , in order to “catching up on accumulated delays”. Among these proposals, the think tank calls, for example, to increase the budgets allocated to civil security to deal with a longer fire season and affecting more departments, as well as to increase the appropriations of the health policy. , water agencies or the Major Natural Risk Prevention Fund.
Sustain an annual envelope
It also proposes perpetuating an annual budget to rethink cities in order to fight against urban heat islands, which transform them into furnaces, to construct buildings adapted to longer heat waves (starting with those for education and research), to reduce vulnerabilities in transport, water and energy networks and infrastructures, to act to make forests resilient or to sustainably support the diversification of mountain economies to respond to the decrease in snowfall.
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