How to adapt France to a warming up to four degrees? After many delays, the government launched its third national climate change (PNACC) on Monday, March 10, on Monday March 10, emphasizing the implementation of around fifty measures at the local level, already deemed insufficient by certain climate experts.
Heat records, floods, coastal erosion: in a France already hot of 1.7 degrees since 1900, the consequences of climate change “are no longer an exception” but “our new standard” and a “tragic reality”, said the Minister of Ecological Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacherby revealing the contours of this “PNACC-3”.
This plan, expected since the end of 2023, has 52 measures intended to protect populations more, better anticipate risks, ensure the resilience of territories and adapt human activities in the face of extreme climatic conditions. It is based on a reference warming trajectory in France at +2.7 ° C in 2050 and +4 ° C in 2100.
Territorial dimension
Emphasis is particularly put in the most threatened territories and sectors such as coasts, mountains, forests and agriculture. Among the measures, the strengthening of protections for workers exposed to heat waves, various studies to better adapt transport and farms, roadmaps to adapt each economic sector, an evolution of the rules for renovating housing or a protection of the main French cultural sites (Eiffel Tour, Mont Saint-Michel, etc.).
A “work” will also start in order to give “legal value” to the reference trajectory of adaptation to climate change (TRACC), a reference document for public actors. One hundred intercommunalities will be accompanied in 2025 as part of an adaptation mission.
Ronan Dantec, vice-president of the Commission on regional planning and sustainable development in the Senate, praised this “territorial dimension”. “For the first time we have a very clear trajectory, it was absolutely essential for local actors,” he said. The emphasis was also placed on the financing of the measures, one of the main criticisms set out before the public consultation launched in October.
What funding?
In addition to the already announced enhancement of the Barnier Fund, created in 1995 to help communities, small businesses and individuals to finance the work necessary to reduce their vulnerability to natural disasters, Agnès Pannier-Runacher also announced a “unprecedented mobilization of the Green Fund to the tune of 260 million euros”.
Nearly a billion euros in water agencies will be oriented towards adaptation and an envelope of 30 million will be devoted to the prevention of predominantly clay soil. A new mission to further mobilize private actors, and in particular banks, in risk prevention will be launched “in the first half of 2026”.
“It is essential that the adaptation is equipped with means up to the stakes,” said the minister, saying that she had increased the envelopes “up to 40 %”. But for i4ce, research institute specializing in climate economy, it remains “still to qualify”. “The increase in the Barnier fund could quickly prove to be insufficient and the reorientation of the green fund to adaptation is above all the effect of a decrease in the means allocated to other priorities, the credits dedicated to adaptation are maintained but do not increase”, judge Guillaume Dolques, adaptation expert at I4CE. For him, this plan “is only a first step” and will only have “meaning if certain arbitrations are made and that we give ourselves the means of ambitions”.
Ronan Dantec also recognizes that in the tense budgetary context, he will “probably miss money”, but still remains “very satisfied with this PNACC” with which, he says, “we have really crossed important levels” on the adaptation site, long insufficiently taken into account.
The NGO Oxfam judges this plan “ineffective, because of adapted governance and budgetary means for its implementation”. It constitutes “a new opportunity to protect the population,” says Oxfam, regretting in particular that the needs of the most vulnerable (elderly, children, etc.) are not sufficiently taken into account. “Inaction will cost much more than adaptation,” said the NGO. An observation shared by Agnès Pannier-Runacher: “One euro invested in adaptation is eight euros avoided to repair damage,” she said.