Telework or fans … Employees are now confronted daily with offices poorly suited to global warming. “It is fresher with me than here, it is hellish,” says an employee of the real estate sector. Its southern exposed office, in a fully glazed building built in the early 2000s in Paris, displays 29 ° C, five more than the other rooms in the same building.
The buildings of glazed office, which appeared massively since the end of the 20th century, combine aesthetic and brightness but struggle to face the hot weather. For the engineer Pascal Lenormand, creator of the hashtag #balancetonfour, “when the glass surface exceeds 30 % of the surface of a room, it starts to become dangerous”. Even the environmental regulations RE2020, which entered into force in 2022, “is not sufficient”, completes Juliette Lefébure, of the Observatory of Sustainable Real Estate (OID).
Billions to renovate buildings
In spaces like those of defense, air conditioning is pushed to try to refresh offices where the temperature quickly becomes untenable. A counterproductive measure as air conditioning is bad for the environment and in turn contributes to global warming. “We are bursting hot, there are bay windows on all floors,” Pesse Adrien, 49 years old. The Institute of the Economy for Climate (i4ce) assessed the annual investment needs in France to adapt buildings, including housing, with heat waves to between “1 to 2.5 billion euros for new construction and 4.8 billion for renovation”, in addition to investments to achieve carbon neutrality objectives.
Our articles on the heat wave
Many buildings continue to be built without taking into account the local context or the long term. However, the consequences are real for the occupants. Employees tell mobile phones that go out because of heat or colleagues who fall under temperature. For Pascal Lenormand, the problem “is above all the endangerment of people”, with critical situations especially in hospitals.