City dwellers are particularly exposed to climate change. Paris is the European capital most directly affected by future heat waves. Difficulties in supplying drinking water, as Barcelona is currently experiencing, and flooding could also affect them.
However, the Court of Auditors has focused its work on how cities prepare, or not, for rising temperatures. The strategies of nineteen towns or intercommunities with more than 50,000 inhabitants were scrutinized. Most of them took up the subject late and the measures very partially respond to the issues. Cities are greening, but that’s about it.
All these cities now have their territorial climate-air-energy plan (PCAET), as the law has required them to do since 2016, but most adopted it three years late. Above all, the diagnoses on which these plans were defined are dated and insufficient. The increased risk of flooding, or urban heat islands, is not necessarily taken into account. Some strategies “remain superficial and insufficient”, and are reduced to an enumeration “without variation of the stages over time”.
A joke
When we look at the tangle of different plans to which the territories are subject, we think it’s a joke. Even the “simplified diagram” is infinitely complex. For the PCAET, few municipalities have integrated the return of the prefects, who had noted a “insufficient consideration of vulnerabilities”. Some municipalities also have a climate plan. Paris has a “climate plan” and a plan “Fresh Paris”.
The cost of inaction is never studied in PCAET. For the most part, the plans are not subject to financial programming. When data is available, the amounts spent on adaptation are low. Blois (city and conurbation) has dedicated 2% of its investment budget since 2018 (4 million euros). Besançon has dedicated 15.3 million euros, or 7.3% of its investment budget, since 2017. However, there is money, notes the Court: water agencies, government green funds.
Communities are adapting by planting trees and de-waterproofing the soil. In Europe, Madrid and London are very proactive on the subject. Madrid plants a “metropolitan forest” – 75 kilometers long, 2,300 hectares. The report cites examples of very successful neighborhood development in Nancy and Mulhouse. “However, scaling up to the city scale is proving complex. »
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