They are alarmed by the increase in air activity and the health and climate risks it entails. More than 70 airport residents’ associations and environmentalists signed a forum published by Franceinfo on Tuesday to request in particular “gradually reduce air traffic” in France.
These groups also call demonstrations from May 9 to 14 to defend the “limitation of the number of flights” as well as “the generalization of curfews at airports, airfields and heliports.”
“We can no longer tolerate that our health, our well-being and the future of humanity are the most affected by activities that mainly benefit the most privileged, and for which there are alternatives,” believe the co-signers of the platform.
The associations anticipate that such a decrease in activities would cause job cuts and, therefore, demand “the professional retraining of the affected workers”.
Example of Amsterdam Airport
The forum denounces the French approach that seeks to “expand airports and make traffic growth a non-negotiable objective.” Its co-signatories thus ask French airports to follow the example of Amsterdam-Schipol airport, which “decided to reduce the total number of flights, introduce a curfew, ban private aviation and ‘abandon the new track project’.
These measures, decided by the Dutch government, temporarily hit a wall: attacked by several airlines when it tried to reduce its activity from 500,000 to 460,000 per year in 2023-2024, Amsterdam airport had to postpone this project after a court decision that prohibited carrying out said traffic reduction for the next season. But another goal, 440,000 flights a year by 2025, has been upheld by the courts.
In France, the general director of Aéroports de Paris (ADP), Augustin de Romanet, estimated in BFM Business that “people should be invited to be more reasonable in air travel” during what he considers a “transition period that will last about 20 or 30 years” between the fleets of thermal aircraft and those that will stop emitting carbon particles in flight because they will work “with electricity, hydrogen or sustainable fuels”.
The column published in Franceinfo is signed, in particular, by several dozen airport residents’ associations that denounce the nuisance, as well as associations such as Greenpeace, France Nature Environment, COP21 Nonviolent Action (ANV-COP21) and Alternatiba.
Source: BFM TV
