For the director of Green Cross International, Nicolas Imbert, the climate and ecological emergency is here. Remaining passive is not an option. He explains it in a program book. The emerging generation is faced with a deadlock and will have to work with on-hand solutions, while rebuilding cohesions in a now unbalanced world. Solutions exist, they are exciting and accessible. It is up to us to seize them. Far from ideologies, it is in action that they are located: eating better and consuming differently, making expensive energy the accelerator of our transformations, sparing our way of living territories to be a peaceful society.
This work provides keys to act, gives a glimpse of perspectives, encourages concrete action, specifically to come together on the ground. After part 1, the contextualization, understanding the situation, the excerpts in this part 2 illustrate actions to be taken.
# 2 Taking Action in the Face of Climate Emergency
Acting on the water
The circular economy of water has been known since the time of the Egyptians and historical liturgical texts, which mentioned the seven lives of water, the importance of reusing it, and the invaluable value of the resource. Now, we have the opportunity to implement this approach through an inclusive methodology, which allows us, for example, to assess the effectiveness of water management policies implemented in Morocco after a decade of water usage rates reaching 120%.
Spain and Portugal are currently drawing inspiration from it to get out of their alarming situation, where their utilization rates exceed 107% or 110%. In France as well, for the past two or three years in certain areas, especially in Pyrénées-Orientales, we have repeatedly exceeded 100%. So, it's the right time for a shock of sobriety in the way we manage water on a daily basis. Everyone can, on the scale of their home, their area, or their lifestyle, implement circular and optimized resource management practices.
Thus, in Porquerolles, as soon as this practice system was implemented, we noticed that within the scope of a contemporary art foundation receiving 200 people per day, the water usage rate from the drinking water network just to operate the toilets was 40%, and that it was possible with the current treatment plant on this foundation to reuse the treated water for the toilets, once the permits were granted. On the same island of Porquerolles, an unprecedented mobilization of the residents encouraged the modest use of resources, both by individuals and by hosts and tourists. These various and sustained efforts allowed for a controlled management of the resource even as the tourist influx to the island significantly increased.
However, water reuse is still marginal in France. The various measures, laws, and decrees published on the subject in France in 2023 and 2024, in line with the 53 measures announced by President Emmanuel Macron in 2023 and reiterated during the implementation of the territorial resilience plan of Pyrénées-Orientales in June 2024, are mostly just catching up on the delay in implementing the European Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC or, more recently, Regulation 2020/741 on water reuse, far from the recommendations of the IPCC or the High Council for the Climate....
Acting on nutrition
Who could have predicted that, while the industrialization of agriculture was at its peak in order to feed the planet, the world was at risk of both seeing shortages and famines multiply, and suffering from the global impact of the food industry on ecosystems? In France, the agricultural sector is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for 19% of emissions.
This ratio is further minimized, since the transportation of agricultural products and unsold food is integrated into the transportation sector and not into this figure, just like their disposal, which is integrated into the waste sector [...] We must concretely think about and simultaneously repair our food security and the economic, ecological, and social performance of agricultural and food sectors.
How to do it? It's about starting by concretely reworking food security, with both feet and hands in the ground, and by re-enchanting all our plates by developing both food security, local and seasonal healthy food accessible to all, and a vigorous regeneration of the natural vitality of our territories through the reconquest of agro-ecological spaces, management, renaturation, and rewilding. The benefits are complementary and diversified. It is about securing a serene present and future food supply, but also allowing for climate-buffering cool spots, revitalized soils, a qualitatively and quantitatively regenerated water system, and better health for both humans and ecosystems.
Acting on expensive energy
We are betting that this rise in energy prices, which is happening very late in the face of a climate and ecological emergency with enormous daily effects, is the trigger that will allow us to quickly transition to a frugal economy. For this, the French ecosystem has some specificities that need to be understood. First, the illusion maintained in the past of abundant and cheap nuclear electricity did not allow the necessary energy renovation actions to be implemented, unlike what happened in our European neighbors.
Thus, on a commonly accepted European indicator, French homes lose an average of 2.5°C in winter over a period of five hours, compared to 1°C in Germany or Sweden, and 1.5°C in Italy.
This is why energy renovation is now an absolute urgency in France, coupled with a social urgency to combat energy precarity [...]
The energy shield devices, which are both economically lavish and ineffective, do not provide the conducive economic context for necessary emergency work. In contrast, the Energy Services Companies (ESCO) scheme, implemented for over twenty years in our German, Austrian, and Nordic neighbors, allows transforming observed energy expenditure, particularly in housing, by investing in sobriety.
Nuclear Power?
The recent price fluctuations and the impact of ongoing conflicts on the supply chain continuity have brought to the forefront the importance of a large-scale energy transformation based on the moderation of usage and the diversification of available sources.
Nuclear power is doubly condemned by its exorbitant costs and its lack of adaptation to the ecological context:
"Building a new power plant [e.g. nuclear] is completely absurd," says Jeremy Rifkin; "the real cost of nuclear energy over the lifespan of a plant is $112 per megawatt, compared to $29 to $40 per megawatt for solar and wind. And there's another problem: the lack of water," he warns; a significant portion of fresh water is used to cool the reactors. But with climate change, river and lake water is warming up and will become unusable in the summer to cool the plants."
This has already happened in the south of France. Once this heavy legacy is decommissioned, the field of possibilities becomes open to deploy a set of renewable technologies that will enable production at very competitive prices.
Hydrogen?
The sector is often presented as the one that will quickly lead to a zero-carbon horizon, with massive requests for public investment and the enthusiasm of a part of the industrial world evident. In its 2020 report, the International Energy Agency talks about global investments amounting to $15 trillion over the period between 2020 and 2050, with a peak of around $800 billion by 2030. Looking at the distribution of investments, it is evident that 85% of these desired investments are related to strengthening electricity production capacities [...].
At the same time, the Energy Transition Commission, a European think tank, notes that regarding possible uses, the relative advantages of hydrogen compared to other decarbonization options are not yet clear. This is indeed the paradox of this push towards the hydrogen economy.
On one hand, the use of hydrogen, this gaseous energy carrier, only generates water and helps to limit carbon dioxide emissions at the point of consumption. On the other hand, the methods of production, transformation, storage, and transportation are currently overall very energy-intensive [...]
Hydrogen has the potential, among other technologies, to be one of the technological building blocks of tomorrow's energy transport, with interesting advantages. However, it is essential, in its emergence and development, not to reproduce the errors of assessment and action that led to the France of the Minitel, Concorde, and nuclear power plants.
Managing our way of living in the territories to become a peaceful society
Space of integration of numerous urban, architectural, economic, social, and environmental challenges, the city has also revealed, through the multiplication of extreme climatic phenomena, its great vulnerability. It must rethink and develop itself, or rather take care of itself, to address current and future challenges. [...]
Even though 80% of the planet lives in cities and this number is constantly increasing, two underlying trends counterbalance this dynamic. First, the urbanization of cities has now reached a level of saturation that is first evident in metropolises and peri-urban areas. Secondly, the excessive fragmentation of roles between city, peri-urban, suburbs, and countryside has developed major vulnerabilities, which are seen in food supply or extreme weather events, but have also generated latent violence in our societies.
Around the previously mentioned territorial evolution models, it is indeed a completely new form of relationship with life and territory that is now at the core of resilience efforts: stewardship. Borrowed from the works of philosopher Thierry Paquot and landscape designer Gilles Clément, this human-centered approach aims to find the balance that allows the city to both adapt and reinvent itself, draw inspiration from living organisms, generate enthusiasm for concrete and successful projects, highlight the joy of living together, develop new solidarities, and build a certain resilience in the face of climate change.
The climate and ecological emergency is at the heart of our lives. It is now that we must act, disrupt our priorities, implement concrete actions, up to the challenges to be happy and serene, project ourselves into the future and contribute to making it desirable and shared.
The emerging generation is facing a deadlock and will have to deal with makeshift solutions, while rebuilding cohesions in a world now without balance.
The solutions exist, they are exciting and accessible. It is up to us to seize them. Far from ideologies, it is in action that they are located: eating better and consuming differently, making expensive energy the accelerator of our transformations, preserving our way of living in the territories to become a peaceful society.
This book provides keys to act, offers perspectives, encourages concrete action, specifically to come together. It is as much inspiration and breathing space that it is up to us to turn into actions and initiatives.
The next chapter? It's up to us to evoke it, to write it, and to live it together. There is an urgency; let's be creative and supportive. And, more than ever, let's listen to the world and its music.
Excerpts from the book "Rethinking the Planet." Its author Nicolas Imbert is a French engineer, executive director of the NGO Green Cross. He works on structuring civil society proposals on climate, environmental health, territorial resilience, and the prevention of environmental conflicts, in France and internationally.
Illustration of One: From this conversation, the AI generated a flow of illustrations. Stefan Muntaner fed it with editorial data and guided the aesthetic dimension. Each illustration thus becomes a unique work of art through an NFT.