Hugo Rochard, https://doi.org/10.4000/developpementdurable.23444

Micro-forest projects are multiplying throughout cities as a new emblem of ecological design of artificial environments. This emerging form of renaturation is bringing a new public narrative investing the discourse of nature based-solutions and civic participation. In Paris, the first micro-forest proposal was carried and implemented by a civic group with the technical and financial support of the municipality. This article analyzes the governance of this nature-based solution through its coproduction, identifying its achievement and challenges on several pilot sites. The analysis shows how a new public narrative is being built from a civic experimentation, while obscuring the difficulties encountered locally by an initiative that faces the territorial complexity of a highly degraded urban environment.

Outline

1. De l’engouement public pour les micro-forêts urbaines à leur gouvernance

1.1. La constitution d’un nouveau récit d’action publique

1.2. Interroger la gouvernance d’une solution fondée sur la nature

1.3. Question de recherche

2. Étude de cas d’un projet citoyen de micro-forêts à Paris : une coproduction ?

2.1. Matériel et méthodes d’analyse

2.2. Une solution fondée sur la nature et sur un collectif de citoyens

2.3. Expérimenter collectivement la méthode Miyawaki : une éthique d’action environnementale et citoyenne

2.4. Une gouvernance collaborative entre apprentissages et négociations entre acteurs techniques et citoyens

3. Discussion

3.1. Un partenariat et des non-dits : les chocs temporels d’une coproduction

3.2. Les défis de l’opérationnalisation : illustration à partir d’un site afforesté

Conclusion

Ugandan climate activists face charges after a month in maximum security jail

The 11 university students could be imprisoned for a year for protesting against the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline Eleven Ugandan climate activists who were allegedly beaten and held arbitrarily in a notorious maximum security prison will appear in court on Wednesday charged with a colonial era anti-dissident offense, as reprisals continue against opponents of an internationally bankrolled oil pipeline.

If convicted, the 11 activists, all university students, face up to a year in jail. Four of them – Nicholas Lutabi, Jacob Lubega, Shafik Kalyango and Abdul Aziz Bwete – were allegedly arrested and beaten by police armed with guns, teargas and batons as they marched peacefully towards parliament in the capital city, Kampala, on 15 December.

They were targeted after becoming separated from a larger protest calling on the Uganda government to stop construction of the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (Eacop), a $5bn fossil-fuel project backed by the French conglomerate TotalEnergies and a Chinese national oil company, as well as the governments of Uganda and Tanzania.

The climate activists said they were forced into an unmarked building within the parliament entrance, where the police officers repeatedly kicked, punched and beat them with heavy objects. It is the same place and same abusive treatment reported by at least two dozen anti-pipeline activists over the past two years.

(...)

The arrests came just three weeks after seven activists from another anti-pipeline group, Students against Eacop Uganda, were arrested and detained under similar circumstances, by the same judge. They spent almost four weeks in maximum security and will also appear in court on Wednesday charged with common nuisance. If convicted, they face a custodial sentence of 12 months.

“It is not normal to detain suspects for even a day for a common nuisance charge,” said attorney Ronald Samuel Wanda, who is representing 15 pipeline protesters. “These arrests are arbitrary … Arresting those protesting peacefully demonstrates that the government of Uganda does not respect its own constitution.”

UN experts, the EU and international rights groups have documented those speaking out against the oil pipeline. In September 2022, the European parliament adopted a resolution condemning Eacop for the “wrongful imprisonment of human rights defenders, the arbitrary suspension of NGOs, arbitrary prison sentences and the eviction of hundreds of people from their land without fair and adequate compensation”.

Hanna Hindstrom, senior investigator for the international non-profit Global Witness, which has published an investigation into TotalEnergies activities in the region, said the company had a vested interest in the crackdown on defenders in Uganda and Tanzania, with a “chilling effect on communities affected by the pipeline”.

“These young people are speaking up for the survival of the planet, its communities and ecosystems, and should be heeded, not thrown in jail,” Hindstrom said.

Last year TotalEnergies told the Guardian it was unaware of “any allegations by human rights and environmental defenders of threats or retaliation made by its subsidiary, contractors or employees in Uganda or Tanzania”.

France's government was on the defensive on Friday after environmental campaigners and opposition politicians accused it of having scrapped a key green policy to appease protesting farmers.

Agricultural workers started to lift roadblocks after more than a week of demonstrations, following government promises of cash and eased regulation.

Among the concessions announced by Agriculture Minister Marc Fesneau on Thursday was that a 15-year-old government plan to stem dependence on insecticides and weedkillers would be put on hold. (...) But government spokeswoman Prisca Thevenot on Friday morning defended the move, saying measures to reduce pesticide use so far had not worked and needed rethinking.

"We need to be able to help them, which is why we are massively investing in finding alternative solutions," she added, without elaborating on what those might be.

The protestes are not all done yet, some farmers Union are against this government's decision and are still fighting for better revenues among other things.

Bangladesh is battling its worst dengue outbreak on record, with more than 600 people killed and 135,000 cases reported since April, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, as one of its experts blamed the climate crisis and El Nino weather pattern for driving the surge.

The country’s health care system is straining under the influx of sick people, and local media have reported hospitals are facing a shortage of beds and staff to care for patients. There were almost 10,000 hospitalizations on August 12 alone, according to WHO.

Dhaka is one of the most densely populated cities in the world and rapid unplanned urbanization has exacerbated outbreaks.

(...)

“There is a water supply problem in Dhaka, so people keep water in buckets and plastic containers in their bathrooms or elsewhere in the home. Mosquitoes can live there all year round,” Kabirul Bashar, professor at Jahangirnagar University’s Zoology department, wrote in the Lancet journal last month.

“Our waste management system is not well planned. Garbage piles up on the street; you see a lot of little plastic containers with pools of water in them. We also have multi-story buildings with car parks in the basements. People wash their vehicles down there, which is ideal for the mosquitoes.”

To cope with the onslaught of infections, Bangladesh has repurposed six Covid-19 hospitals to care for dengue patients and requested help from WHO to help detect and manage cases earlier, WHO said.

(...)

Climate crisis spreading and amplifying outbreaks

The record number of dengue cases and deaths in Bangladesh comes as the country has seen an “unusual episodic amount of rainfall, combined with high temperatures and high humidity, which have resulted in an increased mosquito population throughout Bangladesh,” WHO said in August.

Those warm, wet conditions make the perfect breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes and as the planet continues to rapidly heat due to the burning of fossil fuels, outbreaks will become more common in new regions of the world. (...)

As the climate crisis worsens, mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever will likely continue to spread and have an ever greater impact on human health. (...)

“We are seeing more and more countries experiencing the heavy burden of these diseases,” said Abdi Mahamud, WHO’s alert and response director in the health emergencies program.

Mahamud said the climate crisis and this year’s El Nino weather pattern – which brings warmer, wetter weather to parts of the world – are worsening the problem.

This year, dengue has hit South America severely with Peru grappling with its worst outbreak on record. Cases in Florida prompted authorities to put several counties on alert. In Asia, a spike in cases has hit Sri Lanka, Thailand and Malaysia, among other nations. And countries in sub-Sarahan Africa, like Chad, have also reported outbreaks.

Calling these outbreaks a “canary in the coalmine of the climate crisis,” Mahamud said “global solidarity” and support is needed to deal with the worsening epidemic.

Glyphosate has proved divisive since the World Health Organization’s cancer research agency concluded in 2015 that it was probably carcinogenic to humans. Other agencies around the world, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and EU agencies, have classified it as non-carcinogenic.

The European Commission said on Thursday it would renew glyphosate’s approval based on European Food Agency and European Chemicals Agency safety assessments and subject to new conditions and restrictions, such as maximum application rates.

Unfortunately, this article forgot to mention that some national agencies of countries have opposite conclusions such the french agency "Inserm"...

Glyphosate: Europe divided by the world's most widely used pesticide, Published on 12/10/2023 The risks

Environmental groups have called EFSA's assessment "shocking".

"In our view, EFSA has downplayed the existing evidence from animal and epidemiological studies on the effects of glyphosate, which can cause DNA damage in certain organisms," says Gergely Simon. "This indicates that glyphosate can cause cancer. We therefore believe that, in line with international guidelines from the US EPA, glyphosate should be classified as carcinogenic, which has already been done by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and also by France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm). They have all concluded that, based on the available evidence, there is a probable link between exposure to glyphosate and the development of cancer".

EFSA, for its part, responded that "data gaps are mentioned" in their report, "either as questions that could not be completely answered or as open questions."

The three questions that could not be finalised relate to the assessment of one of the impurities present in glyphosate, the dietary risk assessment for consumers and the risk assessment for aquatic plants. "Overall, the information available does not allow definitive conclusions to be drawn regarding this aspect of the risk assessment," EFSA told Euronews.

Gergely Simon stresses that the risks should not be underestimated under any circumstances. "Numerous studies show that exposure to glyphosate can be linked to both autism in children and Parkinson's disease. We therefore believe that the fact that EFSA has stated that there is no standardised protocol for drawing conclusions on the neurotoxicity of glyphosate should be a critical area of concern, which would mean that glyphosate could not be authorised as it currently is," he emphasises

"In addition, there is a large body of alarming evidence about the destructive effects of glyphosate on the microbiome, as glyphosate is both a herbicide and an antibiotic. It is primarily used, for example, to alter the soil microbiome, but also the human gut microbiome. We know that there are many health risks associated with the destruction of the microbiome. Finally, EFSA has confirmed that glyphosate has the potential to cause endocrine disruption at doses considered safe in the European Union", adds the PAN Europe representative.

"There are no internationally recognised guidelines for assessing the risks associated with the microbiome in the field of pesticides. Further research is needed".

Glyphosate EU, the group of companies in favour of renewing the authorisation of glyphosate in Europe, says: "All allegations have been raised on several occasions and have been dealt with by the regulatory authorities, in Europe and throughout the world. This is yet another attempt by non-governmental organisations to discredit the most comprehensive scientific dossier presented in the application for renewal of EU approval for glyphosate, and to undermine confidence in the regulatory authorities in order to prevent the renewal of approval for glyphosate in the EU". Opposing countries

Germany has argued in favour of abandoning glyphosate in the European Union. In September 2023, at the end of a meeting between representatives of the 27 member states to discuss the European Commission's proposal, the German agriculture minister warned of the threats to biodiversity and stressed the need for a coordinated phase-out of glyphosate at European level, while warning of uneven levels of protection within the EU.

In 2021, the German government announced its decision to withdraw glyphosate from the market by the end of 2023. The country is therefore expected to vote against renewing the authorisation of this herbicide within the EU at the vote scheduled for 13 October.

France, for its part, had also tried to adopt restrictive measures with regard to glyphosate. In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron announced his commitment to completely ban glyphosate in France before 2021.

This time the French's government (kind of the same that the one in 2017) was in favour of glyphosate's use. However since our national agency has published studies that are not in favour of its use, our government chose to not participate in the vote in order to avoid having to justify a decision against our national agency and in the same time avoiding to go against the authorisation's renewal.

The figures published by Oxfam are particularly stark in France, where the richest 1% emit as much carbon in one year as the poorest 50% in 10 years.

(...)
The income threshold for being among the global top 1% was adjusted by country using purchasing power parity – for example in the United States the threshold would be $140,000, whereas the Kenyan equivalent would be about $40,000.

Stark picture in France

Within-country analyses also painted very stark pictures. For example, in France, the richest 1% emit as much carbon in one year as the poorest 50% in 10 years.

Excluding the carbon associated with his investments, Bernard Arnault, the billionaire founder of Louis Vuitton and richest man in France, has a footprint 1,270 times greater than that of the average Frenchman.

The key message, according to Lawson, was that policy actions must be progressive. "We think that unless governments enact climate policy that is progressive, where you see the people who emit the most being asked to take the biggest sacrifices, then we're never going to get good politics around this," he said.

These measures could include, for example, a tax on flying more than ten times a year, or a tax on non-green investments that is much higher than the tax on green investments.

While the current report focused on carbon linked only to individual consumption, "the personal consumption of the super-rich is dwarfed by emissions resulting from their investments in companies," the report found.

Nor are the wealthy invested in polluting industries at a similar ratio to any given investor -- billionaires are twice as likely to be invested in polluting industries than the average for the Standard & Poor 500, previous Oxfam research has shown.

​

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You can read the report here : Richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity

French banks face criminal complaint for money laundering over illegal Amazon deforestation

For the first time, three major French banks and a large insurance group face a criminal complaint for alleged money laundering linked to the deforestation of the Amazon. The complaint has been deposed against banks BNP Paribas, BPCE and Crédit Agricole and insurance firm Axa. The Paris-based advocacy and litigation association behind the move, Sherpa, say that these financial institutions “cannot have been unaware that they were financing illegal activities”. Jade Lindgaard reports on this ground-breaking action.

Jade Lindgaard, 13 November 2023 à 19h12

For the first time, three major French banks and a giant insurance firm are the object of a criminal complaint for the alleged laundering of the proceeds of illegal deforestation in the Amazon. On November 8th a formal complaint was lodged with Paris prosecutors by the non-governmental organization Sherpa against banks BNP Paribas, BPCE and Crédit Agricole and insurance firm Axa for “aggravated money laundering”, “complicity in aggravated money laundering” and the “aggravated receipt of proceeds” from illegal activity.

In the complaint, seen by Mediapart, the four financial institutions are not only accused of having contributed to funding the destruction of the Brazilian forest, but also of having profited from it. Between 2018 and 2022 they invested more than 70 million dollars in two giants of the Brazilian agribusiness sector, the groups JBS and Marfrig.

In addition, BNP Paribas subscribed to three bond issues by Marfrig, which took place in 2013, 2019 and 2021. This year they also had a leading role in a massive bond issue by the agribusiness group totalling 1.5 billion dollars, according to supporting documents in the complaint.

A bond is a form of debt security issued by a body - a state or public or private corporation - which receives a sum of money from those who subscribe to it. It is a form of loan but its difference is that it offers a fixed rate of return over its term and that it is available in a market that is supposedly more closely supervised, and thus less exposed to the media, than more classic banking activities.

In payment for its services relating to the bond issue BNP Paribas received a total of 948,000 dollars, according to the documents supporting the complaint. For its part, Crédit Agricole made 6.5 million dollars in profit from their bonds, Axa made 1.3 million dollars and BPCE 3.8 million dollars, according to the complainants' estimates. Overall, the profits made by these institutions from these financial transactions amounted to 12 million dollars.

When contacted by Mediapart last week, BNP Paribas said they had no comment “about a complaint of which we have no knowledge”. Crédit Agricole indicated they would study the contents of the complaint before commenting. Insurance giants Axa said the group “monitors and updates its internal policies concerning responsible investment, particularly when it comes to the environment and human rights” and insisted that it had “one of the strictest policies on the issue and complies with current laws and international laws”. BCPE did not respond.

These business transactions contrast with the refusal of other institutions to finance JBS and Marfrig because of lingering suspicions over their activities. For example, in 2022 the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) declined to loan 200 million dollars to Marfrig because of the risk to deforestation associated with its activities.

This is one of the strongest elements of the criminal complaint made by the litigation and advocacy NGO Sherpa: it shows the extent to which the environmentally-damaging impact of cattle raising in the Amazon has been known about, and it lists the public reports and investigations by journalists that have been published, some several years ago, which directly point the finger at JBS and Marfrig. The legal complaint says that a “very large number” of public reports show the “systematic and massive nature of the use of deforestation in the supply chain” of the groups whom the French banks have funded. The banks “cannot have been unaware that they were financing illegal activities” concludes Jean-Philippe Foegle, in charge of litigation and advocacy at Sherpa.

Targeting financial flows

This is not the first time that banks have faced legal proceedings over alleged links with deforestation. Last February several non-governmental organisations – including the Brazilian association Comissão Pastoral da Terra and the French group Notre Affaire à tous - filed a complaint against BNP Paribas, accusing it of financing Marfrig.

But that was civil action. This complaint by Sherpa is a criminal complaint concerning offences punishable by law, and has been deposed with France's financial crimes prosecution unit the Parquet National Financier (PNF). Jean-Philippe Foegle calls it “strategic litigation with the aim of obtaining tougher penalties, and that's never been tried before: we're targeting financial flows and it's based on solid jurisprudence”. The banking groups targeted are also under an obligation to show vigilance and to publish each year their commitment to respecting the environment.

The two Brazilian groups targeted are major players in the global agribusiness sector. Marfrig is the second biggest meat packaging firm in Brazil while JBS is the largest meat processing company in the world.

For the offence of laundering to be established, there must first have been an initial infraction committed. In this case, Sherpa says these offences concern the slaughtering and sale by JBS and Marfrig of cattle from illegally-deforested areas, and also land grabs harming local peoples, plus the idea that everyone involved in such deals must have known that forced labour had been used. These accusations are based in particular on an investigation by the Center for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA), an investigative and legal research NGO which tracks illegal greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

Mediapart has seen the CCCA's report. It indicates that around 50% of suppliers to JBS's slaughterhouses in the northern State of Pará display irregularities, as do 40% of those who supply both it and Marfrig in the state of Mato Grosso in the centre-west. Some of the cattle that they buy and slaughter come from farms built on lands where land clearance is in fact officially forbidden by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA). Some of these cattle breeders have been convicted for having broken forest protection rules.

One farm that supplies JBS is also accused of taking land from the Manoki people. Cases of enforced labour and violations of human rights linked to working conditions have meanwhile been recorded at several of JBS's and Marfrig's suppliers. The scale of deforestation between 2018 and 2021 linked with the suppliers of five abattoirs belonging to the two Brazilian groups is considerable, according to the CCCA analysis. As an example, just one of these facilities in the State of Pará is suspected of having caused the destruction of 400,000 hectares of forest.

That is why those behind the legal complaint believe that the funding of these meat sector firms by the four French groups is likely to constitute “support for an operation of investing, concealing or converting the direct or indirect proceeds of a crime or an offence”, part of the legal definition of money laundering in France.

In theory, the Parquet National Financier now has three months to react to the criminal complaint and to decide whether or not to open an investigation.

• The original French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter

Because of its growing impact on society, global warming has taken centre stage in the public debate. While most of us have not read the reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), heat waves, intensifying storms and the multiplication of extreme events remind us of the scale of climate disruption and the urgency of action.

Despite being documented by the Intergovernmental Sciences Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the equivalent of the IPCC for biodiversity, we know little about how biodiversity erosion might affect us and the rest of the planet. Its links and interactions with climate change are underestimated, and any policy to address either in isolation will miss the mark. It’s impossible to take effective action against global warming without addressing our impact on the rest of the living world, and vice versa.

(...)

IPCC scientists have been explaining since their first assessment report (1990) that climate change is a stock problem. To halt global warming, it is not enough to slash greenhouse gas emissions. We need to stabilise their stock in the atmosphere. To achieve reach net zero we must reduce emissions – the inflow into the stock – to the level of the outflow, which is made up of CO2 absorption by carbon sinks (forests and oceans) and the elimination of non-CO2 greenhouse gases at the end of their life cycle. (...)

On the other hand, a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions come from “living carbon”, mainly as a result of specific agricultural emissions (unrelated to fossil fuel use) and tropical deforestation and other land use changes that erode carbon sinks. There is no way to achieve carbon neutrality without a profound transformation in the use of living resources, to ensure the reflux of agricultural emissions and better protection of carbon sinks. This is the challenge of what we might call the agroclimatic transition.

One of the major difficulties of the ecological transition is to carry out these two transformations simultaneously, as they involve distinct economic mechanisms. For fossil carbon, we need to introduce scarcity by reducing the use of coal, oil and natural gas to the absolute minimum. For living carbon, we need to reinvest in the diversity of ecosystems to reduce agricultural emissions and protect carbon sinks as part of a bioeconomy.

From adding to subtracting

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, energy transitions have followed one another. They have all involved adding new energy sources to a system initially based on the use of biomass. The result has been a massive increase in the amount of energy used worldwide.

The climate is forcing us to break with this logic. Lowering emissions is not a matter of adding decarbonised sources to the energy system. It’s about removing fossil fuels. We need to switch from a logic of addition to one of subtraction. (...)

Multiple instruments will have to be called upon to bring about such a transformation. Pricing carbon from fossil fuel use is a key way to reflect the increasing scarcity of the atmospheric capacity to store carbon. Whether obtained through taxation or emission trading schemes, such taxation raises the cost of using fossil fuels, without returning the resulting rents to producers, as happens, for example, when oil prices soar on energy markets. On the demand side, it is a powerful stimulus to energy efficiency and sufficiency; on the supply side, it encourages a shift away from carbon assets.

The main difficulty with fossil carbon taxation lies in controlling its distributive impact. As the “gilets jaunes” protests in France showed, fossil carbon taxation without redistribution to the most vulnerable poses more problems than it solves. Only a redistributive carbon tax will be socially acceptable. Similarly, if carbon pricing is to be extended on an international scale, the proceeds must be returned on a massive scale to the countries of the South.

(...)Another pernicious form of subsidy to fossil fuels is the free allocation of CO2 allowances in the European trading scheme, which hampers the emergence of a green industry, a lever for the competitiveness of tomorrow’s Europe.

Investing in the diversity of living beings

Let’s imagine for a moment that the world has eradicated all use of fossil fuels in 2050. Would we automatically be in a situation of climate neutrality? Everything depends on what has been achieved on the second front of the transition, that of living carbon, the source of a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. (...) Agro-climatic transformation means finding ways to reinvest in biological diversity, in other words, in the abundance of living things. But the price of CO2 does not reflect the value of this diversity. We therefore need to use other instruments, which are more complex to implement.

On land, forests are the main carbon sink. Their capacity to soak up atmospheric CO2 is weakened by a combination of climatic and anthropogenic factors. In France, for example, the CO2 storage capacity of forests has been divided by three since 2005, mainly due to climatic factors. There is therefore an urgent need to adapt forest management methods in anticipation of the severity of tomorrow’s climates.(...)

The key issues of agriculture and food

The impact of farming systems on the net balance of greenhouse gas emissions is not limited to deforestation. Depending on the techniques used, farming systems may themselves release carbon into the atmosphere (deep ploughing, draining of wet soils, etc.) or, on the contrary, store it in living soils (conservation agriculture, agroforestry, etc.). The former erode biodiversity by specialising farmers according to industrial-type logics. The latter use living diversity to intensify production and regenerate the natural environment.

(...) In economic terms, their promotion requires investment in innovation, research and development, the establishment of dedicated farm advisory networks and, above all, incentivisation to reward farmers for the ecosystem services they provide to society. This is not something that happens spontaneously on the market. It requires public intervention and dedicated funding.

As in the case of energy, the agroclimatic transition implies, on the demand side, that we consume smarter and less. The foods we eat have contrasting climate footprints. There can be no successful agroclimatic transition without finding ways to dramatically reduce emissions associated with the most polluting ingredients, including industrially processed foods and animal products(...)

Remembering the ocean

Last but not least, the agroclimatic transition will have to take into account the management of the oceans and marine biodiversity, which are currently the blind spots of climate policies. Global warming and certain human practices (overfishing, pollutant runoff, etc.) are altering marine biodiversity, a crucial component in the storage of CO2 by the oceans. Protecting the ocean sink is vital to stabilise tomorrow’s climate: it is estimated that the continental biosphere contains four times more carbon than the atmosphere. For the oceans, it’s 47 times.

Christian de Perthuis Professeur d’économie, fondateur de la chaire « Économie du climat », Université Paris Dauphine – PSL
Édouard Civel Chercheur au Square Research Center et à la Chaire Economie du Climat, Université Paris Dauphine – PSL