Emmanuel Macron made a commitment, on April 16, in Marseille, shortly before his re-election, in favor of a future “ecological planning”. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) offers her in return a detailed study – entitled “2022-2027, a five-year period to succeed in the face of the ecological crisis” – which she hopes to hand over to her. ” To take [le président de la République] literally, that’s the idea,” slips Isabelle Autissier, honorary president of WWF France. Because hardly this one is elected “that France has already exceeded its nature budget for the year 2022”.
The publication of this work of several months corresponds above all to the date of the “day of the overshoot » for France, on May 5 this year. This emblematic deadline is based on scholarly calculations based on thousands of data points to determine when human societies consume more natural resources than nature has the capacity to produce.
Since the 1960s, the Global Footprint Network has calculated this “ecological budget” based on the carbon footprint of each country, taking into account land take, the environmental impact of agriculture and grasslands, forestry and fishing. On a planetary scale, this day was July 29 in 2021, while it occurred on December 29 in 1970.
In France, regardless of the successive governments, this date only comes ever earlier. Result: the equivalent of 2.9 Earths would now be necessary to meet the needs of humanity if everyone lived on the same footing as the average French. The global average is 1.7 Earths.
Three scenarios
France is therefore not among the good students, it even ranks 97e rank for its ecological footprint. Greenhouse gases represent more than half: those emitted on its soil and those generated by all the products it imports – but these increased by 78% between 1995 and 2018, recalls the WWF.
According to this foresight exercise, the next five-year period could succeed in pushing back the “overshoot day”, at best, to May 30 in 2027. The objective may seem modest. But to gain these twenty-five precious days in five years, the soon-to-be appointed government will have to act and not content itself with implementing the texts, laws, decrees and international commitments inherited from its predecessor. If he does not mobilize, the ax should fall two days earlier than in 2022, or May 3.
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