The final version of the third French National Climate Change Adaptation Plan (PNACC-3) will be presented next Monday (10 March). Its implementation will begin in 2025, particularly through its regionalization, which will mobilize stakeholders around the development of adaptation strategies specific to each region, which will have to involve the various sectors (IDDRI, 2025). To make PNACC-3 an operational and evolving framework, it will need to be accompanied by feedback mechanisms to the national level so that it can adjust as needs arise to support sectors and territories in their transformations.
What potential for transforming economic sectors?
The National Climate Change Adaptation Plan (PNACC-3) will finally be presented on Monday, 10 March, after being postponed several times, then presented and submitted to a consultation that ended in December 2024. This document is intended to provide a framework for action at the national level, particularly with regard to a reference trajectory for adaptation to climate change (TRACC), set at 4°C of warming by 2100. This TRACC must therefore be included in all territorial public policy documents between now and 2030 (SCoT, PLUi, SRADDET, PCAET). But beyond public action, the PNACC-3 also aims to mobilize all stakeholders, including in the various economic sectors (with, for example, measures 36 and 37 on agriculture, measure 9 on the adaptation of housing to high temperatures, or measure 30 on the resilience of transport and mobility), for which it takes over or reinforces existing plans and policies, or announces their implementation, and details the needs in terms of strengthening knowledge.
Science recognizes that adaptation must be more transformational, i.e. it requires profound changes in our organizational methods and systems (UNFCCC Secretariat, 2024). It is the role of public action to enable this more ambitious adaptation: structural changes require a long-term vision, and identifying what could lead to the transfer of vulnerability between social groups, between territories, or between sectors. Among other things, this requires planning the transformations required in each sector, including all the actors concerned. Indeed, the stakeholders will be more willing to accept the adaptation choices if they have been involved in the deliberations to establish the strategy and if the trade-offs have been collectively negotiated.
However, the PNACC-3 remains rather short-term oriented around incremental measures (Ecoact, 2024). Moreover, this national framework does not decide on sectoral objectives to be set out in order to initiate these transformations (IDDRI, 2024), but rather takes up or reinforces existing sectoral policies. This is in line with the spirit of the plan, which does not intend to decide or govern adaptation choices in a top-down manner, but rather to set the framework for their discussion at the territorial level, in order to bring actors into dialogue and define objectives specific to each territory.
Upcoming regional dialogues to make decisions on adaptation choices
This regionalization of the PNACC-3 should be carried out via the regional COPs, which will mobilize regional stakeholders around adaptation in 2025. To make adaptation a priority, it is necessary to go further than taking into account the trajectory of global warming (the TRACC) in regional public policy documents. Adaptation requires the mobilization of stakeholders from different sectors within a region (chambers of agriculture, chambers of trade and crafts, but also trade unions, citizens' associations, etc.) to make decisions concerning the economic and social organization of the region and the implementation of new practices.
The regional level allows for political dialogue on future transformations that must be part of a project for the economic and social development of a territory in the broad sense–for example, concerning issues that affect employment areas, such as the future of medium-altitude ski resorts. These dialogues should make it possible to bring the different sectors of a territory into line around these projects. However, the sectors also have their own instruments, mechanisms, public policy tools and forums for dialogue between stakeholders at various levels. These sectoral forms of governance make it possible to consider developments in the more or less long term for multiple objectives: environmental, for example, such as those of climate mitigation and biodiversity preservation, with a view to implementing the SNBC and the SNB, but also more broadly, economic, social, etc. It is therefore important to include adaptation in these discussions that take place around the transformations of these sectors (IDDRI, 2025).
From the local to the national level
Adaptation is often presented as a local issue, which therefore requires local political management–as emphasized by the European Union's 2021 adaptation strategy. However, the complexity of the subject means that several political levels must be mobilized, according to their respective mandates and competences (IDDRI, 2025), and requires coordination to avoid the transfer of vulnerability, the silo management of shared risks beyond administrative boundaries (adapting standards and legislation, providing support for other actors, including technical and financial support), or to organize solidarity between territories and sectors (OECD, 2023).
How to make sure that the national level remains in tune with the needs that may emerge from these territorial policy dialogues, in order to engage in ambitious adaptation choices? How to make sure that more transformational options are not dismissed due to a lack of feasibility or visibility regarding the support and fulfilment of the implementation conditions?
It will be essential for the implementation of the PNACC-3 to be accompanied by a mechanism of iteration with the national level, so that it is able to respond to the needs that will emerge, whether in terms of the evolution of national sectoral policies, mechanisms of solidarity between territories and sectors, the implementation of compensation, the resolution of trade-offs between priorities or support. This question of support is crucial in a context of great uncertainty about the budgets that will be allocated to existing financial mechanisms for ecological transition and to the state agencies that participate in supporting the actors (ADEME, CEREMA, water agencies, etc.).
