Louise Sallé 3:28 p.m., July 13, 2022

Nice, Montpellier and Nantes are at the top of the cities with the largest urban area covered with trees, according to a Breton company, Kermap, which analyzes the development of territories on satellite images and studies their potential for greening.

Conversely, Parisians are much worse off.

Cities are overheating because of the heat wave!

To cool them down by a few degrees, vegetation plays a very important role.

Some metropolises are better off than others.

The Breton company Kermap, which studies the greening potential of a territory using satellite images, has measured the tree area of ​​each major French city.

Its maps are published on the nosvillesvertes.fr website.

And for cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants, Nice, Montpellier and Nantes come first. 

26% of urban space in Nice occupied by trees

In Nice, trees occupy 26% of the urban space.

"We have very tree-lined elements located on the outskirts of the city center, on the hills and near residential areas, unlike the very compact city center", observes Nicolas Beaugendre, co-founder of Kermap.

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Thanks to trees, outlying neighborhoods can gain up to five degrees less than the city center.

"We observe that in the historic center, very mineral, the temperatures are much higher", analyzes the co-founder who carried out more in-depth studies at the request of the municipality of Nice.

"As soon as we deviate a little from this area, we have a feeling of freshness, which brings comfort to the citizens who live nearby", he adds.

Nice is ahead of Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux, where only 15% of the urban surface is wooded. 

In Montpellier, a resident has 43m2 of trees compared to 9 in Paris 

And among the cities with the largest green space per inhabitant, Montpellier is at the top: 43m2, against only 9 for a Parisian - the Bois de Boulogne and Vincennes being part of the administrative limits of the city.

Because the capital is one of the densest in the world… An issue that is difficult to reconcile with the need for greenery.

“At the time of the development of this city, it was rather a question of having spaces which were not marshy. Vegetation, at a certain time, was not the priority”, indicates Nicolas Beaugendre.

"So in Paris, the creation of parks or the planting of trees is much more complex than in the cities of the South, because their urban sprawl has taken place over the last thirty years".

Kermap suggests to communities where to plant trees, and when this is impossible, where to change surfaces, create plant corridors on cycle paths or create shaded areas.