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In France and Germany, significant networks of local initiatives have developed around energy issues. This article brings practitioners' viewpoints into discussion. It presents the way in which two of these networks – the CLER-network for the energy transition (France) and the 100% – Regions network (Germany) – each identifies itself, describes its action and build-up process in relation to government action, and conceives of justice issues in the field of climate energy policy. The analysis shows that these two networks share a lot, including political ends (localisation of energy production, empowerment of rural territories), but practice quite differently as intermediaries for local initiatives. This suggests overcoming the transition management vs grassroots divide present in the literature and paying more attention to hybrids. It also brings emphasis on a type of intermediary's work, which has not been covered by the academic literature, namely that of tinkering with multiple supports and embedding action in local-national-supranational networking in order to maintain continuity. In discussing justice dimensions, we emphasize that motives or ends of action are only reflectively related to ideas of justice: justice issues seem bound up with a politics of assembling, either as a marker of federative action (all fighting for justice) or as a potentially divisive issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the influence of climate on the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in France. Ordinary, time-varying, and threshold regressions of the number of cases and deaths are run on weather and government variables. The main findings support the role of climate in Covid-19 spread. The results reveal that a rise in temperatures is negatively associated with reported deaths, while an increase in relative humidity or wind and a decrease in precipitations are negatively associated with confirmed cases. These weather variables appear statistically significant only during the winter season. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2003, Western Europe experienced a deadly heat wave. It is estimated that 15,000 people died in France from its direct effects. Applying an indirect estimation technique to the monthly number of deaths by sex, age, and place of residence for the period 1996-2003, we estimate the number of years that would have remained to those who died from the heat wave had they been spared. The paper also evaluates the role of the 'harvesting' effect of the 2003 heat wave in explaining the deficit of deaths recorded in 2004 - estimated at 23,000 out of an expected total of 535,000 deaths. The harvesting effect was modest and accounted for fewer than 5,000 of the 'missing' deaths in 2004. The mortality decline in 2004 is thus due mainly to other factors. One hypothesis is that special efforts have been directed towards isolated older people as a consequence of the heat wave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the climatic influence on COVID-19 transmission risks in 228 cities globally across three climatic zones. The results, based on the application of a Boosted Regression Tree algorithm method, show that average temperature and average relative humidity explain significant variations in COVID-19 transmission across temperate and subtropical regions, whereas in the tropical region, the average diurnal temperature range and temperature seasonality significantly predict the infection outbreak. The number of positive cases showed a decrease sharply above an average temperature of 10°C in the cities of France, Turkey, the US, the UK, and Germany. Among the tropical countries, COVID-19 in Indian cities is most affected by mean diurnal temperature, and those in Brazil by temperature seasonality. The findings have implications on public health interventions, and contribute to the ongoing scientific and policy discourse on the complex interplay of climatic factors determining the risks of COVID-19 transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the climate change impact on the built environment in France. Climatic events affecting the construction industry; Mitigation and adaptation measures; Quality of construction; Role of insurers in the built environment.

A method to build synthetic hydrographs is introduced, based on 1300 gauging stations in France and Switzerland, covering a wide range of size and climatology. For each station, an average of two floods per year are selected by a peak-over-threshold method, providing about 69 000 hydrographs. For a given catchment, some "donor stations" are selected with criteria of proximity in space, size and runoff production. These donors provide hundreds of hydrographs which can complement the ones recorded locally, or replace them if no hydrograph is available. With this subset of hydrographs, one can estimate the catchment's average peak-to-volume ratio of floods, and build the corresponding median hydrograph. Another application is, for a given daily discharge sequence (being observed or simulated), to generate a relevant synthetic hydrograph by combining appropriate hydrographs of the subset. These methods are assessed by performing a jack-knife validation on a wide dataset of stations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the HISTRHONE database we extracted 1483 hydro-meteorological events from AD 1300 to 2000 that occurred in the Lower Rhône Valley, France. Daily heights of the Rhône River at Beaucaire and Arles are also available, from 1816 and 1829, respectively. A total of 517 floods were divided into three categories and a synthetic frequency severity index (FSI) was computed. Running averages of 11 and 31 years show a succession of poor and rich flood fluctuations. Extreme floods tripled in the second half of the period (1650–2000). Singular spectrum analysis isolates a dominant irregular component (main positive anomalies in 1450–1580, around 1700, late 18th century, and most of the 20th century). We focus on the 17th century, with rare flooding events between two secular so-called “hyper phases”, i.e. frequent and/or severe floods. We also recorded 173 episodes of ice in the river, during the Little Ice Age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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