In Paris, environmentalists call on Hidalgo to "preserve all the trees"

The "ambitious revegetation policy" demanded by elected EELV and related officials involves "not only massively planting trees in the ground but also preserving all existing trees", they wrote in a letter written on Wednesday.

The environmental group asks to meet with Emmanuel Grégoire and Christophe Najdovski, the deputies (PS) for urban planning and the greening of public space, to discuss redevelopment projects around the Eiffel Tower and the Porte de Montreuil, as well as all "the felling programs planned as part of the urban projects of the City of Paris".

Planned in the major "OnE" redevelopment project for the perspective between the Trocadero and the Champ-de-Mars, the scheduled felling of around twenty trees, some of them centenarians, has in a few days sparked an outcry on social networks.

The petition launched by the association France Nature Environnement (FNE) Paris and relayed by several personalities, including the journalist Hugo Clément, gathered more than 120.000 signatures, leading the town hall to give up the felling of century-old trees on Saturday, then on Monday to any felling on the site.

These demolitions were to allow the construction of luggage storage for visitors and premises for the employees of the Eiffel Tower. A project that the Council of Paris had validated in February with the voices of environmentalists, in exchange for several concessions including a moratorium on the disputed repair of the Champ-de-Mars.

"We will review the project accordingly," Anne Hidalgo's entourage told AFP on Wednesday, while FNE Paris, which is organizing a press conference on site in the evening, stresses that the "permits have been issued" and demands its "abandonment".

A few days earlier, the association had denounced the felling of 76 trees in eastern Paris, Porte de Montreuil, the subject of another major redevelopment project for the town hall where, according to FNE Paris, 174 additional trees are threatened.

In recent months, environmentalists, present in the executive of Anne Hidalgo but who do not hesitate to ally with the right against her on urban planning issues, have obtained the overhaul of a project of large towers in front of the Seine (XNUMXth century), as well as a greener, less dense rewriting and without large towers of the future district of Bercy-Charenton (XNUMXth century).

For its part, the group Changer Paris, made up of elected Republicans, centrists and independents, regrets, in a press release, that the town hall of Paris "continues to move forward on its Trocadéro Tour Eiffel development project as if nothing was" and believe that "the OnE project must be abandoned".