Presentation
The third French National Climate Change Adaptation Plan (PNACC-3) is to presented on 10 March, 2025. It will be implemented and rolled out in the French regions during the course of 2025. Based on the exploration of three economic sectors (agriculture, construction and water), and on the analysis of a series of interviews with experts, this Issue Brief calls for an examination of the necessary reconfigurations to address the subject of adaptation within existing sectoral governance instruments and bodies, in order to initiate a forward-looking approach to planning a more transformational adaptation, in particular by ensuring the conditions for stakeholders, including the population, to embrace these transformations.
Key Messages
- The sectoral transformations required for adaptation must be envisaged by linking the anticipation of long-term risks to short-term issues (profitability, economic and social, e.g. changes in employment, redistribution) in order to provide responses to the needs of stakeholders. Integrating adaptation into existing sectoral governance is essential, and necessarily multi-scalar (local, regional, national). However, the issues involved in this integration, the scope of the relevant players and the roles at each level vary from one sector to another, as the governance of each is structured differently.
- Adaptation also calls into question the connection between the need for planning on the scale of the transformations required in each sector and the risks of maladaptation and increasing conflicts of use if these issues are managed in silos.
- In the context of the implementation of the PNACC-3, the territorial dialogues within the regional COPs should make it possible to manage the links between sectors and the integration of adaptation with other issues. To this end, these dialogues should be able to provide feedback to the national level by identifying coordination needs that go beyond the territorial level.
- This Issue Brief shows that integrating adaptation will reveal the need for trade-offs, as it will bring out or reinforce conflicts between players, interests and objectives. This raises the question of the reconfigurations needed to tackle the issue of adaptation within existing sectoral governance instruments and bodies, in order to adopt a forward-looking approach to planning more transformational adaptation, while ensuring that stakeholders, including the general public, can support these changes.
