What will the French coastline look like in 20 or 30 years' time? Where will new tourism activities, nature conservation areas, military zones or sea sand extraction zones be located? On Tuesday, November 28, President Emmanuel Macron invited the French public to have their say, during a speech at a forum about the blue economy in Nantes, western France.
The new initiative in participatory democracy, entitled "La mer en débat" ("The sea debated"), will take place as part of a wider debate that opened on November 20, organized by the National Council of Public Debate, and will run until the end of April 2024. "The seas and oceans are where part of our future is being built, and we have before us an agenda for the decades to come," said Macron.
Officially, this public consultation, divided into four parts – one for each of continental France's seaboards – should look at the combination of multiple activities along the country's coast: from tourism, ports, shipping routes, fishing, shipbuilding and nature conservation to military zones and materials extraction. In reality, it will above all enable progress to be made on the deployment of wind turbines, which Macron wants to make the second largest source of electricity after nuclear power.
He announced that he was counting on the taxes generated by wind farms to then help modernize the fishing industry. If the wind energy project progresses as quickly as the government hopes, €700 million could go towards the fishing sector's transition to more sustainable practices and boats that emit less greenhouse gases. On top of this, Macron promised to extend the 20-cents-per-liter fishing fuel subsidy until June 2024.
Around 50 wind farms will have to produce 40 GW of energy by 2050 in order to contribute to the country's aim for carbon neutrality. Macron has mentioned a call for tenders in order to produce 10 GW as early as 2035. Where will wind turbines be installed? The answer is expected as early as the end of 2024, after the consultation. The stakes are high, as the March 10 law on accelerating the production of renewable energies means that there will no longer be local public debates on each individual wind farm. Once this major debate is over, a timetable can be put in place for the next 10 years.
Four nature conservation organizations have already expressed their concern. On November 20, Sea Shepherd France, Gardez les Caps, Défense des Milieux Aquatiques and Wild Legal sent a letter to the French minister for ecological transition and territorial cohesion – the prelude to a likely appeal at the Paris Administrative Court – calling for a moratorium in the name of preserving biodiversity, particularly that of seabirds. They criticized the "serious shortcomings identified by scientists in the strategy for deploying this energy source on our coastlines". Marine Calmet, Wild Legal's president, said, "It's our way of taking a stand in the public debate that's only just begun."
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