“The sea burns, and we can no longer look elsewhere” | EUROtoday

TKings occasions minister, the mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi presides over the coalition of Côters and Côteière de l’UNU. He has simply welcomed the convention on the ocean in his metropolis and publishes My blue line (Michel Lafon), book-manifest to avoid wasting the ocean planet.

The level: What to recollect from the United Nations Conference on the Ocean?

Christian Estrosi: That the United Nations entrusted us, after New York in 2017 and Lisbon in 2022, a summit devoted to the East Ocean, for France and my metropolis of Nice, nice recognition. Lisbon had attracted 800 scientists; In Nice, there have been 2,300. We can see that one thing occurs and that consciences awaken. Today we’re coming into a selections.

What selections?

It is a query of responding to alerts launched by one another for years, and specifically the IPCC. In Nice, the good innovation was to affiliate mayors from the entire planet which convey collectively practically a billion inhabitants. Faced with climatic disruption – the melting of ice, the dangers of submersions, erosion, salinization of land which result in the destruction of farms and market gardeners and the pressured displacements of populations -, we, the elected officers of the final kilometer, are the primary to have the ability to act. Act on city planning guidelines extra involved with the setting, on the renaturation of areas, the decarbonation of mobility …

Read too What is the impression of the oceans on the local weather?In your e-book, you launch the blue alert as a result of the ocean, you say, is “a climatic bomb” …

In Nice, for instance, we went from 15 tropical nights since 1950 to nearly 100 final yr. Everywhere across the Mediterranean, we see the identical phenomenon. It is pressing to anticipate. Since 2008, we’ve “air -conditioned” the town by putting in islets of freshness, selling vegetation, water video games, air currents … warmth kills. In 2024, 3,700 individuals in France died due to the warmth waves. New viruses go up tropical areas. And the Mediterranean warms 20 % sooner than the world common. Forty cruises within the Mediterranean reject as many particles as the entire European automobile fleet.

Hence your expression: “Our Mediterranean Sea is on fire” …

Chirac stated, “Our house burns and we look elsewhere”, we are able to say now that the ocean burns and that we are able to now not look elsewhere. Climatic disasters trigger hecatombs on corals, weaken ecosystems, result in the tropicalization of species … However, all warming is because of human exercise, due to this fact earthly. We heat up the local weather, which ends up in the melting of ice, from the Alps to the Andes Cordillera, together with the Himalayas, and this ends in a multiplication of cyclones and tsunamis.

Read too New Orleans “sinks at the same time as the sea rises”What are the levers of motion?

They are political, however, clearly, first monetary. This is why we delivered to the presence of enormous foundations: we should inject 1,000 billion euros inside ten years.

What did you be taught from the ocean?

I first discovered loads from my authorities capabilities. The Minister of Overseas or Planning of the regional plan that I’ve had many occasions the chance to measure these phenomena. I noticed archipelagos threatened with disappearance in Polynesia; By diving in New Caledonia, I noticed the degradation of the Coral Massif. And, as Minister of Industry, I discovered loads about air pollution.

I’ve an extended relationship with the ocean. As a baby, I noticed an incalculable variety of occasions The world of silence, of cousteau, and I found there that the ocean is an uncontrollable factor which might revolt at any time. Today she does it in opposition to us. By dint of polluting, rejecting plastics, we’re uncovered to all conditions. The sea represents not solely 70 % of our universe, it produces 30 % of our oxygen. It’s as much as us to turn into conscious of it. And to vary issues.

To uncover



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Answer

“My blue line”, by Christian Estrosi (Michel Lafon, 144 p., € 12.95).