2023-10-02 11:00:08
Lawyer specializing in environmental law, associate professor at the University of Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne, Arnaud Gossé believes that the law has made progress in the management of environmental risks but, in particular, due to the lack of a sufficiently developed risk culture , the implementation has significant flaws.
Does the law define “risk culture”?
No. The law defines what a risk is: the probability of the occurrence of an event, happy or unfortunate. It also defines the obligations incumbent on elected officials or business leaders, such as the obligation to provide information, the obligation to prevent when the risk is well documented – such as road safety – or the obligation to take precaution when ‘it is poorly documented – like nanotechnology. Finally, in the event of the risk occurring, the law establishes rules of intervention or solidarity. But it does not define “risk culture”, which remains a sociological notion.
Since when has risk been taken into account in legislation?
Since the Ancien Régime, public decisions have been taken, for example to regulate open-air slaughterhouses and reduce the stench. But it was especially from 1975 that European and then French law developed substantial legislation: the first European directive on waste, the first texts on industrial risks following the Seveso disaster, in Italy, in 1976. can link this to the development of an ecological culture as well as the emergence of environmental defense associations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth or France Nature Environnement.
La Forêt du Pilat campsite, July 19, 2022. Five campsites located at the foot of the Dune du Pilat, in La-Teste-de-Buch, in Gironde, were 90% destroyed by fire. SOPHIE GARCIA FOR “THE WORLD”
Do we need disasters to change the law?
Not only. It is true that the disaster at the AZF factory in Toulouse led to the major law of July 30, 2003 on the prevention of technological risks, for example. But other laws are linked to less specific, more permanent and invisible disasters. Such as the diffusion of toxic pollutants in soils, the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or the artificialization of soils. On these subjects, politicians move when they are challenged by scientists or in reaction to a press campaign.
Read also: AZF, twenty years later: where is industrial risk in France?
Is having appropriate regulatory texts enough to mobilize the population?
The law cannot do everything – for example when entire neighborhoods are built in flood zones, as we discovered in Charente-Maritime, following the Xynthia storm in 2010. The law is also powerless when the State lack of means to enforce the texts. THE Dreal [directions régionales de l’environnement, de l’aménagement et du logement], for example, only have around 1,500 agents to control 500,000 classified industrial activities. After the fire at the Lubrizol chemical products factory in Rouen in September 2019, during the prefect’s press conferences, we understood that the administration did not know exactly everything that was stored on the site.
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