Research
France 2026: notes on ongoing warming
The novel The Tree That Hid the Forest is anchored in a territory — La Réunion — but is being written at a moment when metropolitan France itself is undergoing a visible climatic shift. The year 2026, in the direct continuation of 2022, 2023 and 2024, confirms what climatologists now call a “new regime” rather than a simple trend.
── I. The 2026 figures ── According to the provisional data from Météo-France and the Copernicus service, 2026 ranks, for France, among the five warmest years ever recorded since 1900. The mean anomaly exceeds +2.3 °C compared with the 1991-2020 period across the southern half of the country. The +1.5 °C global threshold — that of the Paris Agreement — has been permanently crossed on a planetary scale since 2024.
── II. Droughts and forests ── The south-west, Burgundy, Provence and Corsica record cumulative rainfall deficits that exceed 40 % over the January-September 2026 period. The forests of the Landes, the Var, the Aveyron and Upper Corsica are shifting from a “resilient” regime to a “declining” one: accelerated mortality of maritime pines, decline of holm oaks, upward migration in altitude of species adapted to heat.
── III. The subject of the novel ── The Tree That Hid the Forest works with this material: a community that lives to the rhythm of a country that is drying out, water sources that retreat, trees that weaken, and human bonds that loosen with them. The novel is not an essay — but it refuses to keep nature at arm's length. What France experiences on its metropolitan forests and what La Réunion experiences on its heights are two faces of the same displacement of the world.
── IV. Resonance with The Chains of Life ── This research also nourishes The Chains of Life. What the trilogy questions — the way in which the powerful rewrite the memory of what is collapsing, promising to “treat” human and environmental suffering — finds in the contemporary climate debates an immediate resonance: words, what is named and what is silenced, remain the first battleground on what should be done, or not.
── V. Selective bibliography ── • Météo-France annual report 2026 (provisional, December 2026) • Copernicus Climate Change Service — annual bulletin 2026 • IPCC, 6th Assessment Report (2021-2023), synthesis • ONF, “State of the French Forests 2025” • Cerema, “Adaptation of Territories to Climate Change” (2024)