After air pollution, the climate is the decline of biodiversity that could be debated in a courtroom.
The NGOs Notre Affaire à tous and Pollinis launched on Thursday a prior appeal against the French state for "faulty deficiency" aimed at having France's "failure" recognized with regard to its commitments to protect nature, which led to “the massive collapse of biodiversity”.
We ask #JusticePourLeVivant ⚖️
With @AssoPollinis, @NotreAffaire launches the first legal action against the State for not having done everything in its power to prevent the massive collapse of biodiversity 🌱
Call @gouvernementFR!
@JusticeVivant pic.twitter.com/vgmAZq51Da
- Our Affair to All (@OurAffaire) September 9, 2021
"It is truly a world first to initiate an appeal against the State for not taking the necessary measures to protect biodiversity on its territory", assured Me Emmanuel Daoud, lawyer of this appeal called "Justice for the living" .
"Despite all the rhetoric, and in defiance of national, European and international laws and conventions, the French state has failed to put in place a pesticide approval system that truly protects pollinators and wildlife in general", reproached Nicolas Laarman, general delegate of Pollinis, warning of the collapse of insect populations, in particular bees.
“Justice for the living”, like the “Affair of the Century”?
In the event of an unsatisfactory response from the State within two months, the applicants plan to turn to administrative justice. An identical procedure was launched at the end of 2018 on the climate by Notre Affaire à tous, Greenpeace, Oxfam and the Nicolas Hulot Foundation. Called "Affaire du siècle", the approach, supported at the time by more than 2.3 million citizens, gave rise last February to a judgment by the Paris court ruling that the State was "responsible" for failures in the fight against global warming. He had, however, ordered a delay to study the advisability of requesting additional measures from the State. A new hearing on this point is scheduled for September 30, after the Council of State's decision in July to give the government nine months to do more for the climate.
To defend “Justice for the living”, it is impossible to rely on quantified objectives. Biodiversity, that is to say the diversity of living species, can only be measured for the moment by observations of disappearance: fewer different plants, fewer insects, birds, amphibians. We have known since 2019: a million species are threatened with extinction in the coming decades. But governments have not yet, unlike carbon emissions, set savings or progress to be made.
This is why the two associations base their use on pesticides, the dangers of which we now know without things moving enough.
Since the Grenelle de l'Environnement at the end of 2007, which set a target of reducing the use of synthetic pesticides by 50% in ten years, successive plans have failed.
The “glyphosate exit” promised by Emmanuel Macron also did not materialize and the government allowed the temporary reintroduction of neonicotinoid insecticides, described as “bee killers”, for beet cultivation.
Read alsoFruits and vegetables: we swallow more pesticides than we thought
Result, in France last year, sales of pesticides, according to associations, increased by 23%. This figure is given on the justicepourlevivant.org website on which citizens are invited to question the ministers concerned on social networks.