Floods: "We have irreversibly transformed the climate"

INTERVIEW

Part of northern Europe: Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium were subjected to unusually violent weather this week, giving rise to a series of particularly destructive floods.

On Saturday, the death toll exceeded 150 on the continent, including at least 133 victims in Germany.

"It is a quite exceptional phenomenon both by its intensity and by the geographical area covered", notes at the microphone of Europe 1

François Gemenne, member of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also a professor at Sciences Po and researcher at the University of Liège.

This city was also the most affected in Belgium by the floods.

"The whole of the hydrological basin was completely flooded. The soils could not absorb this intense precipitation", continues this specialist.

"The last floods, also catastrophic, date back to 1926 in the city of Liège and it is the first time, to my knowledge, that the city has been evacuated due to a natural disaster", points out François Gemenne

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A phenomenon that affects the entire globe

In his eyes, the authorities' astonishment at the rising waters betrays a certain blindness in the face of the imminence of climate change linked to global warming. "We are not at all prepared in Western Europe to face this type of extreme event. There was a great lack of preparation, both from the authorities and from the population, who were taken by surprise in these floods", notes our academic.

He recalls that the IPCC has warned of the threat posed by these climatic phenomena for "twenty or thirty years".

"We did not take sufficient account of these warnings and we underinvested in the field of adaptation and in the field of prevention of natural risks," he laments.

"When we discuss the risks associated with climate change, too often, we imagine that these are impacts that will occur in distant futures or in distant lands."

"These exceptional events are becoming the new normal"

For François Gemenne, it is necessary to change the paradigm: climate change should no longer be seen as a threat that can still be countered, but as a state of affairs which calls for a transformation of our lifestyles. If the fight to limit the impact of human activities on the climate must continue, it must also be accompanied by measures taking into account the irreversibility of these transformations. "This is not at all about being fatalistic, but about accepting the fact that the road to climate change took place in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, the objective, this It is no longer to avoid this exit from the road, but to limit the number of rolls that the car will do, "he insists.

"We must stop telling ourselves that we are going to fight against climate change only by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, even if that obviously remains essential. We must also deploy means of adaptation," argues François Gemenne. "We have to accept that we have irreversibly transformed the climate and that these exceptional events are becoming the new normal," he laments. "We have to adapt to this new situation while trying to limit its impacts as much as possible," concludes this member of the IPCC.