Climate change will make heatwaves more frequent in France, and the country should invest in long-term adaptation to make it a real project, a French climatologist said on Monday.
In recent days, more than half of France recorded at least one monthly heat record during the early heatwave that swept the country, making May "unprecedented" in meteorological and climatic terms, Météo-France reported on Friday, as cited by BFMTV.
According to Météo-France, between May 23 and 27, approximately 109 monthly records for minimum temperatures and 266 for maximum temperatures were broken. May 26 was notably the hottest May day ever recorded nationwide, with an average temperature of 24.9 degrees Celsius.
While temperatures have since returned to more usual levels, the latest heatwave has raised questions about climate evolution and France's ability to adapt to future heatwaves.
Professor François Gemenne, with HEC Paris and director of The Hugo Observatory, explained the lessons from this heatwave and the challenges awaiting France in the coming years.
"This confirms what has been known for at least 20 years, namely that climate change will indeed make heatwaves more frequent, more intense, and stretch them earlier and later in the year. It will grow stronger, last longer, and occur outside the traditional season. This is fully consistent with the scenarios projected by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and others. For about 20 to 25 years, France and Europe have known that this is one of the main impacts of climate change on their territory," he said.
He warned that France has not made the necessary decisions regarding adaptation to heatwaves.
"And unfortunately, we are not making the decisions needed in terms of adaptation. I think we still consider adaptation as a discourse of surrender. So we still have great difficulty accepting the fact that this is now the new normal, the new climate reality in France," he said.
Gemenne said that France should take concrete measures to prepare for more frequent and intense heatwaves, pointing to the country's housing stock as a major vulnerability.
"Well, adaptation is a very vast undertaking that involves infrastructure protection, working hours, school schedules, health issues, migration issues, and the geographical redistribution of the population. Yet we still tend to treat it as an emergency, relying on prevention campaigns and common-sense appeals, whether for floods or heatwaves. But we have a major urban planning and architectural problem. France's housing stock is not at all adapted to these heatwaves, so we will obviously need to invest in the long term to make adaptation a real project," he said.
French climatologist urges France to prepare as heatwaves intensify
