Once the heatwave of June 2025 is over, other priorities will come to the fore: all over the world, and particularly in Europe and France, we’ll see the resurgence of other urgent issues: purchasing power, pensions, war, employment, education, health, public debt. Everywhere, we’ll forget for a while the terrible nights spent in suffocating apartments, the impossible working days in unsuitable workshops, impassable offices, archaic schools, and worse still, in overcrowded prisons. We’ll forget all that, until the next heatwave reminds us that the world, if it stays as it is, is going to become utterly unlivable.
Unlivable, because we’re doing the foolish thing of producing ever more greenhouse gases that disrupt the climate. Unliveable too, because we are doing nothing to adapt our lifestyles to this climate.
Are we going to carry on like this for long? Are we going to continue doing nothing for long? Aren’t we finally going to understand that, in the war economy in which we must urgently place ourselves, there is not only the need for civil and military security. There is also the need for education, health care, lifestyle changes and the development of technologies to meet these challenges. In particular, there is the urgent need to massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to organize our adaptation to the new climate.
Man reinvents himself far less easily than nature. He doesn’t know as well as nature how to take advantage of what threatens him. According to the concept coined by Nassim Taleb, man is not “antifragile”. It urgently needs to become so.
In particular, it will be necessary to adapt to the new climate. This does not mean giving up the fight against climate change. It means acknowledging that the deterioration is already underway and irreversible, and doing everything we can to avoid paying the price. But this is not impossible.
Today, more than half of humanity is already living with a climate identical to or worse than that forecast for Europe in 2100. In these regions, some people (like those living in corrugated iron slums in the megalopolises of Africa and the Indian subcontinent) are living in hell. Others, in these same regions, have been developing ways of adapting for centuries, or at least decades, to an objectively unbearable climate. By building their houses with heat-absorbing or heat-repellent materials, by whitening their roofs, by organizing intelligent air circulation, by locating their cities near rivers and in the shade of tall trees. And, more generally, by imitating nature, which is so adept at adapting to any threat to reinvent itself.
The best urban and social practices of tropical countries are urgently needed to radically transform urban planning and lifestyles in cities around the world, particularly in the North.
Countless Indian and African architects and urban planners are proposing exceptional solutions that are all too often scorned in the North. For example, the Gando school in Burkina Faso, designed by architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, uses raw earth walls to regulate the interior temperature; a raised roof provides effective natural ventilation, keeping the classrooms cool without air conditioning. The Sébénikoro 2000 eco-neighborhood in Bamako, Mali, combines density and ecology, with shaded alleyways, houses made of local materials and sustainable resource management. The Ksar Tafilelt district in Ghardaïa, at the gateway to the Algerian Sahara, uses stone, lime and plaster for their thermal inertia, with narrow, shaded alleyways that promote coolness; wastewater recycling enables the irrigation of green spaces. The Tambass ecolodge in Mauritania, with mud and wood buildings on stilts and typha (a marsh plant also known as cattail or sesque) roofs, blends harmoniously into the Sahelian landscape, promoting permaculture and sustainable water management; the Rajkumari Ratnavati school in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, on the border with Pakistan, built in yellow sandstone, with thick walls and lime linings to regulate temperature; it is equipped with solar panels and offers a cool oasis in the Thar desert. The Indira Paryavaran Bhawan administrative building in New Delhi, the first government building in India to be “net zero energy”, uses insulating materials, natural ventilation, solar panels and a geothermal system to maintain a comfortable indoor temperature. More generally, throughout rural India, mud is being used to build sustainable, thermally-efficient homes.
In Europe, all too few projects have understood this and are taking inspiration from it. Particularly in Spain: in Barcelona, the “Adaptemos las escuelas al cambio climático” project transforms schools into climate-resilient spaces by incorporating vegetation, shaded areas and water points.
But much more needs to be done. We need to do more than just air-condition a few classrooms and workshops. We need to rethink everything, with humility, taking inspiration from what is being done in the South, replacing concrete soils everywhere with natural soils, giving new life to undergrowth, bocages, regenerative agriculture, natural irrigation, the circulation of water in cities by building houses in natural materials that protect against the heat. And even moving cities closer to rivers and lakes.
If, for once, the proud West could demonstrate humility, it would have everything to gain.
Image : Ksar Tafilelt, Ghardaïa
Camille Gillet