To understand global warming, there are curves, warning stripes – graphs made of colored bands symbolizing rising temperatures – and maps, each one more alarmist than the last. But there's also a sensory dimension. The graphs, with their multiple gradations of red, are already being felt in the flesh by the millions of French people who are seeing their land change.

In Burgundy, the harvest date is continually being pushed forward. On average, it's a month earlier than in the Middle Ages, when wine-growing monks religiously inscribed the day of the first harvest. In Brittany and Normandy, pioneers have been replanting vines. In mountainous uplands, business circles are wavering between converting to summer tourism based on pastoralism and investing in snow cannons. Beech forests are gradually disappearing south of the Seine.

Then, there are the animals that we're seeing less of, and others that are moving up from the south, like tiger mosquitoes. In Ariège (southwestern France), Asian hornets are attacking bees at altitudes of up to 1,200 meters.

"Geography is the product of a natural environment and a historical heritage. The climate transition is turning things upside down," summarized Magali Reghezza-Zitt, geographer and member of the French Climate High Council. "In the long term, what will become of the salt marshes of Guérande [Loire-Atlantique on the western coast], the maritime marshes of Mont-Saint-Michel, the Camargue, the wine-growing regions, the mountain fir forests? France is already changing a great deal in terms of landscapes, and this is going to accelerate."

Only just redrawn by the 2015 NOTRe (New Territorial Organisation of the Republic) law, will the regions have to reinvent themselves in the coming decades? Following the NOTRe administrative and cartographic evolution, the large, regrouped regional entities have been working to find a common identity, sometimes redesignating themselves with names linked to history or geography: Midi-Pyrénées-Languedoc-Roussillon has become Occitanie; Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur transformed itself into the Sud region. The future climate, however, is likely to change things once again.

Coastal erosion is leading to serious questions in some seaside resorts. Other changes once seemed more distant but have become very present since 2022. Are heatwaves going to make major cities less attractive at certain times of the year? Will the sun – the Mediterranean coast's main asset – become an enemy?

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