Lhe first round of the presidential election will take place in a few weeks and the campaign seems to have all the difficulties in the world to get started. If more than a thousand researchers are to be believed, the candidates already declared seem in particular to be missing out on the debate on ecology. In a column published on France Info, Tuesday 1er February, 1,400 researchers are indeed worried about the “lack of democratic debate” on climate and biodiversity.
Admittedly, the programs absolutely all contain a “green component”, the spirit of the times obliges. But the subject has all the difficulty in the world to impose itself in the debates, still very largely devoted to questions of purchasing power and immigration.
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“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, etc.).
Quick, substantive questions
“The challenges ahead of us include reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preserving 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”, underline these researchers, including climatologists Valérie Masson-Delmotte and Christophe Cassou, all two members of the UN group of experts on climate (IPCC), the geographer Magali Reghezza-Zitt, member of the High Council for Climate (HCC) or the president of the Scientific Council of the National Museum of Natural History ( MNHN) Luc Abbadie.
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These challenges concern multiple economic sectors and the lives of French people, they continue. “The citizens still have to 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 renewables”.
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