LFI deputies believe that there is a “collective responsibility” for the forest fires ravaging Europe and beyond, but also point to “government management” which has favored monocultures, and demand “forest planning”.
LFI deputies believe that there is a “collective responsibility” for the forest fires ravaging Europe and beyond, but also point to “government management” which has favored monocultures, and demand “forest planning”.
“The government has been condemned twice for climate inaction”
“The increase in the risk of fire is linked to climate change” and “the government has been condemned twice for climate inaction”, reminded Tuesday the boss of the LFI group Mathilde Panot and the deputy Hendrik Davi in front of the press.
Certainly there can be an “individual fault of the one who sets the fire” but “there are droughts and stands (forest) which cause it to spread”, explained the latter, new deputy and until then director research in forest ecology. The parliamentarians presented their bill “aiming to strengthen the resilience of forests to the effects of climate change”.
A research plan on forest resilience
It would be a question of making public aid conditional on greater diversity of plantations, of safeguarding the staff of the National Forestry Office at their 1999 level, and even that the State finance a public research plan on the resilience of forests .
Already in 2020, LFI deputies had tabled a bill to limit clear cuts in French forests, that is to say the felling of all the trees on a plot, seen as the symbol of a “short-term management” and anti-ecological. On July 20 on the site of the giant forest fires of La Teste-de-Buch (Gironde), Emmanuel Macron announced “a major national project to be able to replant this forest”.
Western Europe faced a historic drought in July and two heat waves in barely a month, during which fires ravaged forests in Gironde, Spain and Greece. A third episode of summer heat wave began Monday in the south-east of France and should extend to most of the country.