Nearly 1,400 researchers are concerned about the “lack of democratic debate” on climate and biodiversity in the presidential campaign and urge the candidates to express themselves on these essential subjects, in a column published on Tuesday on the site of franceinfo. If the programs of most of the main candidates for the presidential election, from Jean-Luc Mélenchon to Marine Le Pen, contain more or less detailed proposals related to the climate and environmental crisis, the subject struggles to impose itself in the debates. , dominated by questions of purchasing power or immigration.
The climate absent from the democratic debate
“We note with concern the absence of democratic debate in the presidential campaign on the serious upheavals in progress and to come, whether they concern the climate, the ocean, biodiversity or pollution”, explain these 1,398 researchers in different disciplines. (climatologists, oceanographers, mathematicians, economists, philosophers, historians…).
“The challenges that await us include the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the preservation of life. But they also relate to the nature and pace of adaptation, the fair distribution of risks and efforts, solidarity between generations or between territories”, further emphasize these researchers, including climatologists Valérie Masson-Delmotte and Christophe Cassou, both members of the UN group of experts on climate (IPCC), geographer Magali Reghezza-Zitt, member of the High Council for the Climate (HCC) or the President of the Scientific Council of the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) Luc Abbadie.
“The speeches of inaction are multiplying”
These challenges concern multiple economic sectors and the lives of French people, they continue. “The citizens must still be able to decide in their soul and conscience. For this, the candidates for the presidential election must be able to express themselves, and therefore be questioned on these fundamental questions”, these researchers further underline.
“While the talk of inaction is multiplying, it is more essential than ever to be able to deliberate calmly on the alternatives, the opportunities and the constraints of the various options considered”. “The voters need to know the proposals of the candidates for the presidential election and their conditions of implementation”, they insist, without reducing the debate “to a confrontation between supporters of nuclear power and defenders of energy renewable”.