Covering climate change in the city of love

0:00Circling the city of Paris is an old abandoned railway. It was built in the 19th century and for decades it shuttled people and goods around the perimeter of the city. These days the defunct rails are used as walking paths and in the fall of 2023 one of its tunnels was used as a makeshift classroom. We went down and there were little desks set up in the tunnel and they were ready to have the kids have school down there. That is Eleanor Beardsley, NPR's longtime correspondent in Paris. It was a drill, but not for, you know, terrorist attack or something like that. It was for a heat wave. A heat wave.

0:35Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average. And in recent years, Paris has consistently been hit by so-called heat domes, a phenomenon where sweltering heat stays in place for days, and not just in the middle of the summer. You can have a heat dome in May, in June, in September. That's Ziad Touad, who helped organize the heat wave drill that Eleanor visited in 2023. So we have to think about the future and to be sure that any student can go to school for two or three days, even if it's in a tunnel or in a parking. Consider this. Paris has increasingly found itself on the front line of the climate crisis.

1:12And covering the city and the rest of France now means regularly reporting on deadly climate events.

1:21From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Consider This from NPR. NPR correspondent Eleanor Beardsley moved to Paris in 2004, and since then, one story has increasingly become part of her beat, climate change. So for this week's Reporter's Notebook series, I wanted to talk to Eleanor about covering climate change in the city of love. Europe is heating up faster than the global average, and Paris in particular can get extremely hot. You get these heat domes, and people are dying. This is serious. What is it about Paris that makes it so vulnerable to heat? Well, Scott, Paris is one of the most densely populated cities in Europe.

1:59Paris also lacks trees. I mean, you will see beautiful tree-lined avenues and beautiful parks, but not everywhere. And some places you go to are just, you know, concrete or stone, and there's just no shade to be had. There's also these old, beautiful, quintessential Paris buildings, Haussmann era. Baron von Haussmann, who was the architect for Napoleon III. and these typical Paris roofs, even if you don't know this name, Mansard roofs, you've seen them. They're like with these dormer windows that come down the roof come to span. Oh, yeah. They're really romantic and, you know, you think of a Garrett apartment.

2:31Well, if you were to live in one of those attic apartments, you would have, even on the top floor of a building with a roof like that, you have four times the chance of dying than somebody who lives on a lower floor in a heat wave because those zinc rooftops can heat up to 70 and 80 degrees centigrade. And so it's like 130, 40, 50 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. And it just makes it unbearable and dangerous. What a on-point metaphor for all of this. This one image that everyone has in their mind of romantic Paris is actually a huge problem in 2025 due to the heat. It's true. I've always wanted to live in one of those buildings, and now I'm thinking twice about it.

3:13So this, I think, is something that a lot of American listeners don't fully grasp. And you've been covering the city, this beat, for a long time. Did you ever think that just the basics of the heat in the summer would be a part of your beat? No, I never did. I actually moved over here in 2004. And the year before, 2003, there was probably the big first huge wake-up heat wave. And about 15 ,000 people died in France that year. and many of those were old people alone in apartments in Paris. And the whole country just was reeling and it was a big wake-up call. But, you know, people used to refer to that summer of 2003, but now we've actually had many summers of 2003, not as deadly, but every year now it seems we're having heat waves and they're compared to maybe this summer of 2016.

4:02I mean, it's just, and this year we've already had two and they came in June in the very beginning of July, so they're coming more frequently and earlier. And so it is quite frightening, actually. Let me ask as a reporter how you approach the climate change aspect of this, because that can be tricky to cover on a lot of different fronts. You don't want to oversimplify because there is nuance. Even if we see the big picture trends, you can't tie everything directly to climate change. You need to think about just the overall tone of the frequency, because frankly, it can be a bleak topic to cover.

4:37There's a lot of challenges. How do you think about that when you are doing stories on these heat waves and putting that important broader context into it? Well, it's true. You cannot link every forest fire and every heat wave to climate change. And so you don't, but there is a trend that we're seeing. I know that from covering these, there's just been so many more heat waves in the last 20 years than there were in this previous century. So there is a trend. Climate is not so much a political issue in Europe, and people here believe basically that there is climate change going on. When people are suffering, you kind of can see beyond the political dimensions of this.

5:16You know, a lot of European cities especially are really rethinking their overall architecture to deal with these challenges that are going to be here for the foreseeable future. You mentioned trees, you mentioned the roofs. Is Paris trying to address either of those particular challenges in broader ways? Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's another thing you do. You get vines. You cover buildings in vines. That cools them down. And culling buildings. We've built too densely because you need airflow coming through buildings. Yeah, and actually the city of Paris, the mayor has cut way back on automobile traffic, individual cars.

5:52So there's 750 miles of protected bike lanes, Scott, in this city. That means there's a ramp. Like you can't, a car can't touch. You can cross the city of Paris on your bike and never, you know, go in a car lane. and that has helped a lot. That's helped the air quality, and they're also planting what are known as these little mini urban forests. I was just the other day in front of the Hotel de Ville, which is the main city hall in Paris, and that was just a massive esplanade of stone, and so it was always very hot. And they have planted like these massive planters of full-grown forests, ferns and ivy, but also trees, saplings, but also full-grown trees.

6:31I was stunned. I couldn't, someone told me about it and I said, I got to see this. I don't believe it. And I went and there it was, a little forest in front of the Hotel de Ville. And also, you know, talking about these rooftops being so hot, I met a young guy. His name is Etan Levy. He helped co-found a company called Roofscapes. And he took me up to the very top of one of these buildings to show me their product. And what it is are these massive wooden planters that go on the roofs. They are places where you can sit out and enjoy the view of Paris. but also they plant all kinds of plants, and there's the soil and the greenery, and that cools it down immensely because wood does not conduct heat.

7:09And so here's Étan Lévy telling me about these timber platforms that they're putting on the roofs now. Wow. These are the rooftops of Paris. We're surrounded by a sea of zinc roofs and chimneys. Levy says these romantic-looking zinc rooftops absorb heat. Their surface temperature can reach 70 degrees Celsius, 158 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, residents on the top two floors of these historic buildings have four times the chance of dying in a heat wave. Levy is part of a new company called Roofscapes that wants to build timber platforms on top of the zinc roofs. First of all, we're trying to create a shading effect.

7:55The wood will keep solar radiation from directly reaching the zinc surfaces. And second of all, with this timber platform, we're very much trying to add more greenery. The majority of our platforms is going to be covered with soil and plants, which will further help decrease the temperatures inside the buildings. I don't want to make light of these really serious trends, because like you said, these are serious heat waves. People are dying from them. These are major problems. But Eleanor, I just want to say, as you know, to me at least, you have the most idyllic posting on paper in NPR. And I have to ask you, are you telling us that we should no longer think about visiting Paris in the summer?

8:37What do you do if this is a city? What is it? You're hearing stories like this. Well, first of all, I would say no. You have to still come to Paris. It's a beautiful city. But be aware that it could get hot. Know where the parks are, rivers. You could go to a movie in the middle of the day if you need to or go into a cool department store. And I will say this. This is kind of a neat romantic thing. Paris lives at night when it's really hot. I mean, I was out doing my daily walk on the Seine River. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people out walking, jogging, biking, having wine, sitting there.

9:09It was midnight. It felt like 6 p.m. and it was midnight. And so you kind of live at night, but that does make you sleep too late the next day. but you just, the rhythm of the day completely changes. I would say still calm, but be aware that it could happen. That was NPR Paris correspondent Eleanor Beardsley. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell and Janaki Mehta. It was edited by Adam Rainey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan.

9:37It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.