The environmental association Bloom is attacking a decree on marine protected areas before the Council of State, accusing the government of “ecological imposture” for failing to formally ban
all human activity in some of these areas, according to a statement issued Friday.
France, like the European Union, has set itself the goal of protecting 30% of its waters, one third of which should be under “strong protection” status by 2030, a key point in international negotiations on climate change and the preservation of biodiversity.
However, according to a CNRS study in 2021, only 1.6% of French waters, mainly around the Southern Territories (south of the Indian Ocean), fall under the maximum level of protection, the definition of which is under debate.
To meet the objective, reaffirmed by President Emmanuel Macron in May at the One Ocean Summit in Brest, the government published on April 12 the decree defining an area, maritime or terrestrial, under “strong protection” in other words the maximum protection in France.
It is “an area in which the pressures generated by human activities likely to compromise the conservation of ecological issues are absent, avoided, eliminated or strongly limited, and this in a sustainable manner”, with an adapted regulation and an effective control.
For Bloom, the wording of “this decree whitewashes destructive activities in strong protection zones (SPZs), when they should prohibit all human activity.”
France, the world’s second largest maritime power in terms of surface area, “undermines Europe’s ecological ambition for the ocean by creating a legal definition into which the extractive industries will be able to fall in order to pursue their bio-climatic activities in areas supposedly
protected,” the statement continued.
The NGO has also published a study on the intensity of fishing in all French marine protected areas (MPAs), regardless of the degree of protection (in 2022, nearly 33% of French waters are covered).
Conducted using satellite data from vessels, the study “reveals that in 2021, industrial fishing spent nearly half of its time (47%) fishing in supposedly protected marine areas” to varying degrees, the association says.
The NGO denounces the use of “gears that scrape the bottom such as bottom trawling or demersal seines”, particularly in the Iroise Sea (Finistère) and in the Bouches de Bonifacio (Corsica).
A few weeks before COP27 on climate change and COP15 on biodiversity, France must move from words to deeds and adopt a “strict protection” regime in line with international scientific recommendations”, in particular those set by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and “ban industrial fishing, including bottom trawling, in all its marine protected areas”, concludes Bloom.
