Reinforced brush clearing obligations, criminally punishable cigarette butt throwing: at the start of a high-risk summer and while Canada is in the grip of exceptional megafires, Parliament has raised the legislative arsenal a notch to better prevent forest fires
The bill of senatorial origin to “strengthen the prevention and the fight against the intensification and extension of the fire risk” was definitively adopted Thursday by a final unanimous vote of the Senate, the day after its approval by the deputies.
In the National Assembly, only the elected LFI voted against, castigating “legal, technical, administrative, in other words wind”.
The Minister in charge of Relations with Parliament, Franck Riester, sees on the contrary “a strong signal sent to forest owners, residents of forests, environmental protection associations, local elected officials…”.
After a very difficult summer 2022 on the forest fire front, France is preparing for a new difficult season. A thousand hectares have already burned in April in Cerbère, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, and the executive is on a war footing.
President Emmanuel Macron traveled to Gard in early June to oversee the deployment of the new Civil Security resources announced after the massive forest fires last summer.
The government has also initiated the accelerated procedure on the text proposed by the Senate, allowing its final adoption in less than three months, after an agreement between deputies and senators in the joint committee (CMP).
The text reinforces the legal clearing obligations (OLD) for owners of land close to forests, with in particular increased fines in the event of breaches.
The senators regret, however, that “there will only be sticks and no carrots”, the proposal for a tax credit for clearing work not having been accepted.
Today, only 30% of OLDs are completed.
The text also enshrines the ban on smoking in the woods or forests during “periods of risk”. The periods concerned will be fixed by the prefects.
Cigarette butt throwing is explicitly included among the criminally punishable causes of involuntary fire. For the most serious cases resulting in the death of one or more people, the criminal penalties could reach ten years’ imprisonment and a fine of 150,000 euros.
About 90% of fire starts are of human origin, recalled Minister Delegate for Relations with Parliament Franck Riester.
The text gives “a legal basis” to the practice of “tactical cutting” of trees, implemented in Gironde last summer for the first time since 1949.
It also provides for an exemption from fuel tax for vehicles of the Fire and Rescue Services (Sdis).
But the senators regret that local authorities remain excluded from the scheme for reducing employer contributions granted in return for the provision of volunteer firefighters.
Ecologists voted for the text “reluctantly”. Monique de Marco castigated “a small text” from the CMP. “The government has assumed its lack of ambition by limiting itself to budgetary considerations,” she accused.
Last year, 72,000 hectares, including 60,000 hectares of forest, went up in smoke in France. “Which corresponds to the pollution released by a vehicle classified as a Crit’Air 5 sticker which would have circled the Earth 450,000 times”, according to the chairman of the special Senate committee Jean Bacci (LR).
Areas usually spared, such as the Jura or Brittany, had also been affected.
A Senate monitoring mission had highlighted worrying prospects: in the Mediterranean region, the areas burned could increase by 80% by 2050; nearly 50% of metropolitan moors and forests could be affected by a high fire risk, compared to a third in 2010; the high-risk period will be three times longer, with winter fires expected to increase, as we have already seen this year; fires on vegetation or agricultural land should also develop, including on the outskirts of cities.
06/29/2023 20:04:47 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP