The Corsican tragedy, as brutal as it was unexpected, with five deaths and devastation, comes on top of the 50,000 hectares of forests that have gone up in smoke since the beginning of July throughout the country.
The holidays of the French will have taken place to the rhythm of emergency evacuations for those who were in the disaster areas… and for the others, images of devastation, of fighting against an implacable enemy, fire, and its corollary, the storm, following each other without respite. We suddenly realize that these climatic accidents can destroy, even kill, without warning.
In truth, it is not fires and floods that are new, it is now their frequency and their systematic repetition. Storms follow the heat wave and mass fires. The Earth is burning and we can no longer look elsewhere, hence the interministerial crisis unit chaired Thursday evening by Emmanuel Macron from Fort Brégançon.
the President of the Executive Council of the Community of Corsica Gilles Simeoni welcomed the president’s call to express his emotion, and the arrival of the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin: “These are gestures that count.”
The mobilization of relief and solidarity, as for the fires, will have been immediate. There is no place for politics on these subjects, because everyone is taken aback: the government, elected officials, Météo France, the entire population. We thought we were monopolized by purchasing power alone before a return to school which promised to be complicated on the social level, between budgetary fights, pension reform and the threat of Covid, against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine which is gripping the economy.
These questions remain more topical than ever. But the threat comes from elsewhere: this “disturbance” which has become a climatic “peril” in common parlance. We need to rethink everything: the safety of people and property – a challenge, by the way, for insurers – our way of consuming water and energy in particular, cities, industry, the economy, transport … Without waiting for the trajectories to 2030 and 2050, drawn in the major international meetings.
“This five-year term will be ecological or it will not be”, had launched Emmanuel Macron in April during a meeting of the presidential campaign in Marseille. Premonitory statement echoing the repeated warnings of environmentalists for many years. A prophecy overtaken by reality, which obliges without delay to move from words to deeds.