“We have a certain number of homes that are simply more habitable in times of climate change,” warns urban planner Sylvain Grisot.

“We have a delay in adaptation which is very clear in the park, but also a delay in awareness of an issue that we have often called ‘summer comfort’ in the profession when we can clearly see that it is a question of summer habitability”denounces Tuesday, August 13 on franceinfo Sylvain Grisot, urban planner and founder of dixit.net, an urban research and consulting agency. Nearly 4.8 million homes are poorly insulated in France, or 15.7% of the stock according to the government. “We have a certain number of homes that are simply more habitable in times of climate change.”

“We have a form of climatic obsolescence of the building stock”, describes the urban planner, while almost half of France was on heatwave alert last weekend. The problem is that the necessary changes cannot be made with the snap of a finger. “It takes a long time to adapt a built environment, buildings are built for 50 or 70 years. We have already built more than 80% of the city of 2050, which means that we have an absolutely massive amount of work to do.”

These new buildings, just like the old ones, are not suitable in terms of their insulation, underlines Sylvain Grisot.“There are some pretty fundamental things that we have forgotten. […] we have lost the uses that we have always had in Provence of night ventilation, shutters etc.” The urban planner takes the issue of through-housing as an example. “It’s a home that can be ventilated at night and so we’ll be able to lower the temperature and ultimately avoid accumulating heat day after day. But a through home is no longer what we produce today.”

“It’s time we got started, we’re waiting for the government’s adaptation plan”he concluded. “It’s a huge project, lots of jobs, lots of savings, but we’re still waiting for the right moment, the longer it goes on, the more we drag our feet.”