France's highest administrative court on Monday ordered the state to pay €20 million in fines for failing to improve air quality in major cities. The penalties came on top of another €10 million from the same court for the same reason in 2021.
The latest legal decision comes five years after the Conseil d'Etat (Council of State) court ordered the government to reduce levels of nitrogen dioxide and fine particles in more than a dozen zones to comply with European standards.
"To this day, the measures undertaken by the state don't guarantee that air quality improves enough to respect pollution thresholds as quickly as possible," the Conseil d'Etat said in a statement on Monday.
While acknowledging "improvements over time", the legal body considers that the situation "remains fragile or bad" in several areas.
It said the money will go to environmental groups which brought the case.
50,000 euros will also be donated to the Friends of the Earth association, which initially seized the Council of State in 2017.
"It is a decision that seems reasonable to us. The Council of State notes like us that its decision of 2017 is not respected and that its first condemnation either", welcomed Louis Cofflard, lawyer of the Friends of the Earth.
It added that despite some improvement in places such as Grenoble, four areas remained particularly at risk: Toulouse, Paris, Lyon and Aix-Marseille.
Progress, but not enough
Pollution, linked in particular to car traffic, represents a major public health issue.
Mortality linked to ambient air pollution remains a significant risk in France with 40,000 premature deaths attributable each year to fine particles, Santé Publique France (Public Health France) reported last year.
Environment minister Christophe Bechu acknowledged the court's decision in a statement and said he would meet officials from the country's most polluted cities.
Among its recent efforts to curb air pollution, the French government has initiated a plan aimed at halving the atmospheric pollutants induced by domestic wood heating, the main source of fine particle emissions, by 2030.
It has also put into place various financial aids and bonuses for the acquisition or rental of cleaner vehicles.
Low mobility emission zones (ZFE-m) are to be introduced in around thirty additional large cities by the end of 2024.
A government report published in 2021 showed there had been a significant reduction in air pollutants over the last 20 years. On an index of 100 back in 2000, sulfur dioxide is now at 16, nitrogen oxide is at 40, a government report said in 2021.
The report's authors acknowledged however that legal thresholds were regularly exceeded.
France is among several European Union members that the EU's top court has found in breach of the bloc's air quality standards in recent years.
Brussels pushing EU members for compliance and taking legal action against those flaunting the rules.
(with newswires)
