The Senate wants to correct the inconsistencies of the law setting the objectives of "Zero net artificialization (ZAN)" of soils

"This is probably the biggest concern of our local elected officials at the moment," said rapporteur LR Jean-Baptiste Blanc during the presentation of the bill (PPL), the purpose of which is to "correct" the "Climate and Resilience" law which implemented the objectives of the ZAN last year.

“It has been a few months since we alerted the government to a difficulty of application and the concerns of elected officials”, explained to AFP the centrist Valérie Létard, president of the joint mission created in 2022, at the initiative of four standing committees.

"We must get communities out of the blur," she said, adding that the PPL should be debated in the Senate at the end of February and "then examined in the National Assembly so that it can be concluded quickly".

“The purpose of this text is not to modify the two main objectives at the heart of ZAN, that is to say the reduction of 50% by 2030 and net zero in 2050”, assured Ms. Létard. "It's ambitious, but necessary for our environmental objectives."

The purpose of the mission is to "summarize all of this work and propose avenues for the development of the law to provide solutions to the identified difficulties that have come to us from the territories", she underlined.

"You have to be careful to work well to ensure that it is not perceived as imposed from above, otherwise it would really be a failure," warned the senator.

The implementing decrees of the ZAN have aroused the discontent of several associations of elected officials, including that of rural mayors who have denounced "a territorial imbalance" and the risk of a "creeping supervision" on the part of the regions.

The measures proposed by the PPL plan to facilitate implementation by ZAN communities by supplementing and "adapting" its legal framework, by "strengthening territorial governance" or even by "better involving communities at the regional level". .

In parallel, the Association of Mayors of France (AMF), which challenged in June before the Council of State two of the three decrees of application of the ZAN, formulated Wednesday twenty proposals for implementation.

Among these proposals are the taking into account of renaturation actions from 2021, the extension by one year of the deadline for integrating the ZAN objective into town planning and development documents, derogations in economically classified as "rural revitalization zones" (ZRR), or a different count for projects that promote the fight against climate change, such as the creation of cycle paths...

Asked Wednesday in the Senate about the ZAN, the Minister of Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion Christophe Béchu said that he was waiting for "white smoke" from the Senate text to ensure "to amend the device in the spirit of openness that the government has shown since the beginning of August, when it suspended the implementation of the decrees of the end of April".

As far as regulations are concerned, the "rewriting of the decrees is planned for the beginning of next year", specified Mr. Béchu.