the government’s +4°C adaptation plan will take us out of “denial” to “manage what is inevitable”, according to François Gemenne

Every Saturday we decipher climate issues with François Gemenne, professor at HEC, president of the Scientific Council of the Foundation for Nature and Man and member of the IPCC. Saturday February 17: adaptation to forecasts of rising temperatures.

The Minister of Ecological Transition Christophe Béchu called last year to prepare the country for a possible warming of 4°C by the end of the century. While the Paris Agreement provided for global warming limited to 2°C, the minister created a surprise by declaring that we had to come out of “denial”.

Last month, Christophe Béchu presented the government’s plan for adaptation: how do we live in a France at +4 degrees? The analysis of François Gemenne, member of the IPCC.

franceinfo: A climate of +4 degrees is huge, right?

François Gemenne: Yes and no, actually. Yes, because it’s obviously a huge upheaval. The average annual temperature in France is 14°C. If it rises to 18°C, it is a gigantic difference, which will firstly affect ecosystems, but also our health and our economy. This means an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme phenomena, such as heatwaves, but also a drop in the productivity of workers, for example – including those who work in an office. It is a gigantic upheaval, and therefore a huge undertaking.

On the other hand, contrary to what we have often said or read, this is not at all a disaster scenario.

“+4 degrees is not at all the most pessimistic scenario, contrary to what we may have believed. It is a median scenario, which is still relatively optimistic.”

François Gemenne

at franceinfo

The +4°C scenario is the one which corresponds, at the global level, to the trajectory that temperatures would take if all governments strictly respected their most ambitious commitments to date. This would correspond to an increase in the global average annual temperature of 2.6°C by 2100. This gives approximately +4°C in France, since Europe is a region of the world where temperature increases are more marked than ‘elsewhere. Today, we are rather on a trajectory around +3°C globally, which would lead to a temperature rise of more than 4°C in France. But it must be said that the scenario that was considered for adaptation before was a France at +2°C. So, obviously this scenario is a bit of an electric shock.

How did we suddenly go from +2°C to +4°C? If +4°C is not a pessimistic scenario, the +2°C scenario must have been pretty damn optimistic, right?

Indeed. A France at +2°C is not optimism, it is unconsciousness. We are already at +1.8°C, so suffice to say that we will be at +2°C in a few years. And to govern is to plan. In fact, we have lived in denial for a very long time when it comes to adaptation.

“We have long believed that we would be spared the impacts of climate change, that it was for others, for future generations, for the countries of the South.”

François Gemenne

at franceinfo

Then, in the summer of 2022, we realized that we were also vulnerable, and that we were not at all prepared. And so we had a huge backlog to catch up on, and we had to work extra hard.

But why were we late like that? However, we have been warning about the consequences of climate change for years.

Adaptation has always been the poor relation in the fight against climate change, in fact. For a very long time, it was even a taboo in international negotiations, because we feared that it would provide a pretext for governments to delay their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And even now, we tend to consider adaptation as a form of renunciation in the fight against climate change, as if we abandoned the idea of ​​reducing our emissions and resigned ourselves.

“Adaptation has always been the poor relation in the fight against climate change, as if we resigned ourselves to accepting its impacts.”

François Gemenne

at franceinfo

But the problem is obviously that the impacts of climate change do not depend only on our own emissions, but on global greenhouse gas emissions. France’s climate future does not depend only on our own emissions, our own decisions, but also on what is happening in Washington, Shanghai, Delhi, Lagos or Mexico… And so that poses a real question in terms of sovereignty, which we will surely have the opportunity to talk about again. It also implies that we must adapt anyway, whatever our efforts to reduce our emissions, because it does not depend only on us. It is no longer a question of choosing between reducing our emissions and adaptation: we must do both, it is a question of climate physics.

Is that why we’re so late? Because we didn’t understand that it was a complementary strategy to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and that we thought we had to choose?

It must also be said that the economic model of adaptation is different. Reducing emissions is an investment strategy that will generate profits. Adaptation also mobilizes very heavy funding, but here, it is a question of avoiding costs – this is often less attractive, politically speaking. But the good news is that adaptation largely depends on you: reducing emissions requires international coordination of commitments, which is not necessarily the case for adaptation. And above all, there are policies that can kill two birds with one stone: the thermal renovation of buildings, for example, makes it possible to both avoid energy waste, but also to adapt to extreme heat. We can and must do both: we must both avoid what would be unmanageable, but also manage what is inevitable…