After air pollution …
Noise around the big airports, the other failure of the French state!
18 associations and collectives seized the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister to request the application of European legislation
France does not respect EU regulation 598/2014, which came into force in 2016! This text requires Member States to carry out, or have carried out, a balanced approach study to each of the airports where more than 50,000 movements of aircraft over 34 tons are operated per year, once a noise problem has been identified, or a new operating restriction is being considered. This study makes it possible to retain several measures or combinations of measures to reduce noise around airports.
In France, 9 airports are compulsorily concerned: Bâle-Mulhouse, Bordeaux-Mérignac, Lyon-St-Exupéry, Marseille-Provence, Nantes-Atlantique, Nice-Côte d´Azur, Paris-Charles-de Gaulle, Paris-Orly, Toulouse-Blagnac.
- Today, some of them have undertaken such a study, but the process is far away to succeed. For others, even worse, it is not planned.
- No independent authority has been appointed by the State to conduct the studies, in total violation of the Regulations: airport operators and the DGAC are in charge.
- Strategic airport noise maps, necessary to identify an overrun noise limit values, have not been revised or published.
The French State is therefore in breach of the Regulation.
Consequence for the populations affected by the traffic of these airports: no measure of real and tangible reduction in aviation noise is considered while the consequences on health, well documented thanks to the epidemiological study DEBATS1, require action without delay.
This is why the applicant associations, through their lawyer Maître Louis Cofflard, today called on the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister with a request:
- an injunction to the competent prefects to have a balanced approach study for the 9 airports concerned,
- an injunction to the competent prefects to re-examine the relevance of the strategic noise maps and publish them,
- designation of the independent administrative authority(ies) in charge of conducting balanced approach studies that may lead to operating restrictions.
UFCNA & al.
Press release 9 March 2021
