Question 17479 — woods and forests

Summary

Mr. Alexandre Allegret-Pilot draws the attention of the Minister of Ecological Transition, Biodiversity and International Negotiations on Climate and Nature to the legal obstacles which oppose the realization, in peacetime, of discontinuity cuts and water reserves necessary for the prevention of megafires and to the ecological contradiction that they maintain. The fire which has hit Gironde since July 22, 2026 has led to the evacuation of nearly 220,000 people in 23 municipalities. Alongside the firefighters, dozens of harvesters, brushcutters and bulldozers were engaged to urgently open cuts along the roads and secure the emergency response. This work, decided and executed in a few hours under the authority of the State representative, was decisive. Conducted cold, several years earlier, they would have avoided a part of the destruction. Conducted cold, they nevertheless come up against a legal regime which makes them almost impossible in practice. A felling creating a discontinuity in a massif may cumulatively fall under the authorization provided for in article L. 124-5 of the forest code, the regime of classified wooded areas of article L. 113-2 of the town planning code, which subjects cuts and felling to prior declaration, the assessment of the impacts Natura 2000 of article L. 414-4 of the environmental code and, where applicable, an exemption from the strict protection of species under article L. 411-2 of the same code. The creation of a water point or a reservoir intended for firefighting falls under the IOTA nomenclature of article R. 214-1. Each of these decisions opens an appeal that approved environmental protection associations can exercise. automatically on the basis of article L. 142-1, for judgment periods which are measured in years. Law No. 2023-580 of July 10, 2023 strengthened the tools for defending forests against fires, but did not address this litigation risk. This rigidity produces the opposite of the desired effect. A discontinuity cut removes a few dozen hectares of stand, in a selected and reversible manner; a megafire destroys it tens of thousands, with the soils, habitats and protected species that environmental law specifically intends to preserve. The Gironde fire covered approximately 42,000 hectares. According to the European Forest Fire Information System, French fires released 1.4 million tonnes of CO2 over the first seven months of 2026, compared to an average of 1 million tonnes over the last twenty years, estimate reduced since it does not include the combustion of organic matter in the soil or that of lignite present in the Landes massif. The carbon sink that went up in smoke will take several decades to rebuild. Added to this are the erosion of exposed soil, the runoff of ash into waterways, the spilled retardants and the considerable volumes of water consumed by the fight. Prohibit a cutting of a few hectares in the name of protecting a habitat, only to then let this habitat burn in its entirety, is not an environmental policy but a misinterpretation whose ecological cost increases with each season. The result is known: the forest owner, the municipality or the union gives up, not because the project would be illegal, but because the cost and the hazard of the dispute exceed what it can assume. Prevention has thus become legally more difficult than reconstruction after a disaster. He asks him if the Government intends to establish a special fire risk prevention regime, applicable to felling creating discontinuities and to water storage works, as long as this work is undertaken at the initiative of the owner and certified as compliant by the departmental fire and rescue service or included in a forest protection plan against fires. This regime could be based on a single declaration replacing the aforementioned authorizations, on the recognition of a compelling reason of major public interest within the meaning of article L. 411-2 of the environmental code, on the crystallization of the means and on the attribution of the dispute in first and last resort to the administrative court of appeal, accompanied by a limited judgment period. He finally asks her what timetable legislation is envisaged to make this system operational before the 2027 season.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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