Fires in the Pyrénées-Orientales, increasing heat waves, temperature records, droughts which weaken soils and foundations: these phenomena add to a long list of worsening climatic events that we have been experiencing at an accelerated rate in recent years.
If economic projections are numerous and all have their legitimacy, they must in no way erase or supplant the social and human consequences and their absolute primacy. In any case, this is the voice that I brought to Aix, during the meetings organized from July 2 to 4 by the Circle of Economists.
Laissez-faire and disempowerment
Climate disruption, through its effects, creates a new form of violence. Extreme climatic events combine with geopolitical unrest, economic or technological difficulties, and must be considered fully as a new social violence, profoundly unequal. This violence is not only material: it is also inscribed in bodies and minds.
Ecoanxiety is no longer an abstract concept, it is a concrete suffering experienced by thousands of French people, a diffuse anxiety which, for some, is coupled with real psychological distress and well-identified disorders: insomnia, state of astonishment, feeling of helplessness. An observation that we make on the ground, directly, when we go to meet those affected by a fire or flood.
Clarity of vocabulary always has the advantage of sparking pedagogy and action because it is part of our social contract. On this path, our liabilities are heavy, our learning difficult, our memory too often absent, but all events have the same point in common which is linked to a form of laissez-faire and lack of responsibility.
Call to action
From the floods of Vaison-la-Romaine in 1992, and its 42 deaths, with constructions in the bed of the river, to the storm Xynthia in 2010 and its 53 deaths in the submersible zone, we are the direct victims of our lack of foresight. The current effects of the shrinkage-swelling of clays are an equally dramatic illustration for the families concerned: according to the new government map published in 2026, more than 12 million individual houses are now exposed, too often due to a lack of prior soil studies.
The debates are open, not always in the best way, often incomplete and anarchic, more statistical than human. The emergency is certainly responsible. It is in this adverse context that consensus at least on this issue would have every advantage in emerging to initiate action.
Every citizen or every business should take the time to discover the national plan for adaptation to climate change drawn up in 2025. This document, which projects France to 2100 with an average temperature rising by 4 degrees, deals in the right order first with the security of people, businesses, local authorities, and infrastructure through 52 projects and 200 actions. He figures inaction at a decline in GDP of 10% which would obviously be a social tragedy. In other words, a structured call to action.
Fighting Fate
Center of the debate and corpus of reference, the ideas could be linked there, the preventive actions take root there in coherence and perhaps we could even build there a real ambition of executive planning, directing the limited but far too dispersed means to seek the real impact. In short, Rocard without Rocard…
The subject is not a question of choice between economic and social, mitigation or adaptation because like Buridan’s donkey who died of hesitating between eating and drinking, we could all be its victims. Dealing with climate change also and above all means putting a lot of humanity into it to collectively fight what can appear to be an inevitability.
This content is blocked because you have not accepted cookies and other trackers.
I manage my choices I authorize
About opinions
This text is signed by a guest author. He expresses his opinion and not that of the editorial staff. Our Live section aims to allow the expression of pluralism on religious, social and current affairs subjects, and to encourage dialogue, according to the criteria set by our editorial charter.
Share your opinion in comments or by writing to us at: readers.lacroix@groupebayard.com
