A guest on Matin Première this Wednesday, Cécile Neven looked back on the fire in the Hautes Fagnes and, above all, on the work undertaken since the start of the legislature to prepare Wallonia for the consequences of climate change.
The Walloon Minister for Energy and the Air-Climate Plan wanted to highlight an essential point: the fire in the Fagnes is not the endpoint of action. Today's climate policy rests on two complementary tracks: reducing our emissions and adapting our territory to an already changing climate.
On the first front, mitigation, the Government has put the Air-Climate-Energy Plan (PACE) back on an operational track. Today, nearly two-thirds of its measures are underway or completed. The aim is to turn climate ambitions into results, notably through decarbonising our energy, renovating buildings and improving mobility.
But the other major undertaking of this legislature is Wallonia's adaptation. Long before this summer's fires, in-depth scientific work had been launched to objectively assess the territory's vulnerabilities. More than 700 maps have been produced.
By the end of the year, around twenty concrete, planned and measurable actions will need to translate this expertise into decisions. Water management, town planning, construction, soil protection, infrastructure resilience: the goal is to durably integrate climate risk into the public policies that shape Wallonia.
And this is where the real, deep reform lies. It is not simply a matter of adopting a new climate plan, but of revising the rules themselves. Legislative and regulatory texts will need to be adapted in several areas so that climate change is genuinely taken into account in how we build, plan and develop our territory.
A cross-cutting and structural approach on this scale had never before been undertaken in Wallonia in terms of climate adaptation.
It is a less visible undertaking than a communication stunt in the face of the crisis, but probably one of the most structuring: durably evolving our decision-making framework to better anticipate tomorrow's risks.
“Between communication and action, I will always choose action,” Cécile Neven summed up on La Première.
Watch the interview again on La Première