Planning decarbonization through local resources: the pragmatic turn that France must take
The transition to a low-carbon economy is imperative to mitigate climate change. But it’s not just a matter of emission reduction targets: it is also a matter of physical resources actually available in the territory. This is highlighted by the recent report Water, soil, biomass, energy: Planning decarbonization through local resources published in December 2025 by The Shift Project, a French think tank committed to climate-energy issues.
The challenge? Ensuring that France does not repeat the mistake of a transition driven by abstract targets, without taking into account local material constraints, particularly water, biomass, electricity, and soil — key but limited resources, already subject to non-energy uses and threatened by climate change.
A continued dependence on fossil fuels… but very disparate across territories
According to the report, at least 45% of final energy consumption by department still relies on fossil fuels. This dependence, which remains structural, varies greatly from one territory to another: from a department like Lozère with around 1.4 TWh to very industrialized territories like Bouches-du-Rhône with nearly 55 TWh consumed in fossil energy.
This disparity has two important consequences:
the decarbonization capacities are not the same everywhere: the available levers (modal shifts in transport, electrification, sobriety) differ based on the local characteristics of the territories;
the shocks to the supply or prices of fossil fuels do not affect all territories in the same way, making transition strategies unequal without appropriate planning.
Increased risks of conflicts over local resource use
The report highlights the expected increase in tensions over several critical resources:
Electricity
The electrification of uses — mobility, heavy industry, reshoring — leads to a sharp increase in demand. In industrial departments such as Nord, Bouches-du-Rhône, or Moselle, total electricity needs could rise by up to +140% by 2050, equivalent to several new nuclear reactors in production capacity.
This poses major logistical challenges: strengthening infrastructure, securing the balance of the electrical grid, and arbitrating between competing uses.
Wood energy and biomass
The use of wood as an energy source could increase by +28% as early as 2030 compared to 2021, heightening competition with industrial wood uses and creating conflicts between territories that have more or less of this resource.
Agricultural biomass
To meet regulatory caps on biofuel incorporation (up to 7% of road fuels), it would be necessary to mobilize the equivalent of 7% more of the national Utilized Agricultural Area (UAU), an amount comparable to 80% of the total area of Brittany — a huge challenge if we seek to avoid significant imports and reduce external dependencies.
Land and real estate
The artificialization of land, concentrated especially along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, increases the pressure on land already contested between agriculture, housing, industry, and energy infrastructures. In the long term, this intensifies the competition for available space, crucial for both energy production and food or ecological uses.
Climate change amplifies constraints
Beyond the scarcity and uneven distribution of resources, the report highlights that climate change itself alters the conditions of access and availability of these resources.
sea level rise and the risks of submersion threaten agricultural land and infrastructure in coastal areas;
wildfires, droughts, and extreme weather events influence the ability of forests to produce timber and capture CO₂;
some agricultural soils are becoming less productive or more vulnerable to erosion.
These hazards require to integrate safety margins into any planning, rather than relying on static projections.
Two pathways to reduce usage conflicts… with very different implications
To mitigate these potential conflicts, the report identifies two main approaches:
Increasing the availability of resources through production or imports can help limit certain usage conflicts, but at the cost of increased pressure on infrastructure and greater dependence on external resources,
Containing the rise in demand through levers of sobriety and efficiency by mobilizing levers of sobriety and efficiency, appears instead as a more manageable short-term option and more robust in the face of climate uncertainties.
The study emphasizes that sobriety, particularly energy and land use, must be a strategic pillar, as it allows existing resources to be valued without intensifying their exploitation or extraction.
Concrete Recommendations from the Report
Beyond the diagnosis, The Shift Project puts forward several structuring recommendations for effective territorial planning:
affirm the essential but limited nature of local resources and their role in national decarbonization;
recognize that territories contribute differently to transition levers depending on their characteristics (climate, demographics, industrialization);
articulate decarbonization strategies with territorial planning through inter-territorial cooperation;
integrate margins of safety into prospective scenarios to account for climate uncertainties;
expand and enrich available territorial data to facilitate accurate and comparable diagnostics;
train and raise awareness among elected officials and territorial agents regarding planning through local resources.
Conclusion: a more realistic and more resilient planning
The report from The Shift Project does not invite us to give up on decarbonization, but to rethink its framework of action: to move away from a logic of simple national objectives to embrace planning based on local physical resources, their constraints, and their interactions.
This pragmatic approach is necessary to avoid painful trade-offs and unnecessary economic and social tensions, while ensuring a transition that is both effective and fair among territories.
