Category: Ecology

From a first glance Le Havre (LH) does not present itself as a bastion of sustainability. As the largest container port in France, a city of almost purely concrete, and the home of many chemical refineries, there is definitely much work to be done before Le Havre can be considered Green. However, amidst the concrete, Le Havre is full with ambitious environmental projects – most notably the eclectic urban oasis known as Hangar Zero – as well as nature reserves in the surrounding area to get lost in for hours. Whether you are looking to get involved in ecological work or just want to spend time in nature, you will find it in Le Havre. In this article we focus on Le Havre’s history through an environmental lens, and in a subsequent article you can read about specific organizations in Le Havre to get involved with–Growing Your Sustainable Roots in Le Havre.

The history of Le Havre’s starts with a port. Being located on the estuary of the Seine river, Le Havre is connected to Paris and passes through the biggest city in Normandy, Rouen, whose port was opened in the 6^th century. Later, King François opened Le Havre’s port in 1517. More recently, Le Havre’s history is entangled in trade and ecological challenges in the 21^st century. Two thirds of French international trade passes through Le Havre, making it the largest port in France, the 4^th in northern Europe, and the 58^th in the world by number of containers. These figures highlight a challenging situation for the port city. As the most important port to access the French market, it is losing traction in competition against other ports in the Northern Range such as Rotterdam, Hamburg and Antwerp.

According to the French government, “The year 2011 was marked with a new fall of Le Havre port’s market share in the [Northern] range, […] contrasting with the [container traffic increase in] the other ports of the region”. To tackle LH’s lack of competitiveness in the beginning of the 21^st century, French authorities developed a major joint venture comprising the port of Paris, Rouen and Le Havre all together, creating HAROPA.^, This is part of a wider project called Axe Seine which aims to enhance Paris’s competitiveness as a European metropolis by concentrating its future developments along the Saine. Associations and initiatives like Hangar Zéro aim to challenge this narrative by offering a degrowth perspective. 

Another key factor of competitiveness is transportation from the port to the hinterlands, which is the main problem of LH, given its limitations in post load-off transit. This dynamic can be seen with the newest container ship stop— Port 2000 —which allows for the largest type of containership to stop in LH, but still fails to fix the bottleneck present at post load-off transit.  In 2023, 85% of all containers were transported by road, 10% by inland navigation and 5% by train. In light of this, many projects were proposed to increase inland navigation. It was eventually decided in 2018 that building a new dyke, called the chatière, would provide greater access to the Seine thus increasing total offload capacity through fluvial channels. Support for this project are the many challenges the port currently faces regarding inland navigation. Namely economic, as the current river transportation requires first to move containers from the maritime port to the river one by one on truck or train before shipping them. Also logistical, as not all river boats are allowed at sea, which is the only way to access port 2000 for now and this connection requires good weather conditions making it unreliable according to Haropa. As we have seen, because of economic reasons Le Havre’s port seeks expansion to inland travel through increased use of the Seine. However, the chatière, dyke, they propose to this end raises environmental concerns.

The port authority’s chatière was challenged in court by environmental associations on the basis of two concerns. First, building a new dyke comes at an important environmental cost. Associations like Ecologie pour le Havre consider the cost to be much higher than the benefits. According to the principle of “éviter, réduire, compenser” (avoid, reduce, compensate) of the French law, all large infrastructure projects must include an environmental impact evaluation before, companies are held responsible for their environmental impact and must find a balance in their project, avoiding environmental impact altogether or reducing it if possible, or compensate for the loss caused by this activity. If inland transport is less carbon emitting than road transport, Haropa plans to transit only 12% of containers via rivers and canals (compared to the current 10%). Hence, the environmental benefits are questionable. 

The second claim against building the chatière concerns a fish breeding area situated where the dyke would be constructed. The project will destroy this habitat and reduce the number of fish. The impact on biodiversity and fishing are clear. The Conseil d’Etat (French highest court for administrative litigation) still approved the project in December 2024. The construction started in March 2025.

The Seine estuary is also an important environmental concern when it comes to the development of the port. As container ships are in a race for gigantism, so do ports such as Le Havre. The estuary is a protected area where a wide range of bird species breed every year. This fact indicated the need to scrutinize the industrial activities with respect to environmental norms. 

Looking at the port from La Catène, you can see the construction of the new cruise terminal on the other side of the water. This problematic project by Haropa was started in 2024 with the support of Le Havre’s mayor and the region’s authorities. The project explicitly bet on an increase in cruise activity and will allow hosting ever vaster oceanliners. The terminal will comprise 3 halls and a park. The environmental argument of the project is that Haropa is currently electrifying the terminals of the port, allowing for a greener energy source. The left is opposed to the project and plans on transforming the building for other purposes — mostly cultural or community venues — if they are elected at the mayor’s office in 2026. The right — in power in LH for the last 30 years — has wished to develop tourism and the service economy in LH, which requires attracting often older and richer demographics. According to the authority, the cruise terminal will attract more consumption to the city. This argument is combated by the left which argues that cruises are entirely environmentally nonsensical and therefore merit none of the public’s finances–better used for other demographics. As we have seen, Le Havre’s industrial developments are rooted in response to competition, but often fail to account for the needs of the natural environment that the city is embedded in. Outside of industry, the perceived panacea of “development” is confronted with the associated environmental costs, dynamics which are present in Le Havre. 

In France,  43% of energy consumption and 23% carbon emissions are due to the construction sector, and real estate is a serious question. Le Havre’s population has been shrinking since the 1990s and is now stabilizing. To tackle this trend, the right-wing mayor’s office started developing “Le Havre vision 2020,” an urbanizing project aiming to “modernize” the city. The explicit goal was to appeal to older people and highly educated workers to develop the tertiary activity of the city, which is historically industrial. The Quartier de l’Eure, the neighbourhood where Sciences Po is located, best embodies the strategy. The overall strategy is for the authority to use public funds to develop amenities in poor neighbourhoods in order to then sell former port areas to real estate companies to build housing that will benefit from the amenities. As a result, new buildings in the Eure neighbourhood are 50% more expensive than the older buildings in the same area, because they benefit from the amenities. This neoliberal urban planning is questionable for many social and environmental reasons. Systematic destruction of old buildings to construct higher standing housing is ostensibly an unsustainable urban development policy. 

The development of former port areas to the southeast of the city are also problematic. Flooding is arguably the most important problem of LH in the middle/long term. Especially because the city is already at high risk of flooding coming from the river Seine to the East. This risk is present even as the city fails to use the bathtub approach for estimating submersion risk–something that every other French city does. Flooding would directly affect the industrial port, the Eure neighbourhood, and Danton. More broadly, the lower part of the city is under high risk of submersion, leading real estate companies to try and make quick profits there before the eventual floodings, at the expense of the buyers. According to projections, floods will damage buildings in the Eure neighbourhood in the next 20 years, namely before many people will finish repaying their loan. 

In this brief outline of Le Havre’s environmental story we have seen how Le Havre is both a victim and perpetrator of environmental degradation–a sort of double identity implicit in all environmental problems. Modern societies must mitigate their environmental impact at the same time as they build resilience to the effects of this very impact. By focusing on two dynamics in Le Havre, the industrial and commercial expansion of the port through the chatière project and the cruise terminal, as well as the adaptability problems Le Havre faces with real-estate and flooding risk, we have seen this double identity in play. For more information on specific projects in Le Havre engaged in these environmental problems see the next article–“Grow your sustainable roots in LH.”

by Sylvain Sainte-Marie on behalf of Sciences Po Environnement Le Havre

The term “free market” is very common nowadays and refers to an almost natural functioning of exchange: everything has a price and must be traded for something of the same value. But this seemingly trivial notion is almost an oxymoron. “Free” can be understood as ‘without constraints’, but also as ‘does not cost anything’. Associated with “market”, a place of economic trade, there is a double contradiction: on a market, nothing is for free; on a market, there is a strong constraint on what things can be: they are only a certain amount of money. 

In fact, the idea of reclaiming the commons has long been a topic in a world where the oxymoron “free trade” is more and more accepted. “Commons is a generic term or a variety of social forms existing in Europe, particularly in England, before capitalist or socialist industrialization transmogrified them into resources.” Commons can be land, objects, know-how—exactly like resources. However, they are not subject to exploitation or seen from a perspective of growth. The word is often found in the economy in the term “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin, 1968), the idea that shared resources are being overexploited since commons are free but rival and thus each actor’s interest is to exploit as much as they can. Elinor Ostrom received a Nobel Prize for working on a solution between state planning and private ownership to regulate the exploitation of such resources. In both cases, though, we are still talking about resources, i.e. potential wealth sources if they are traded. The problem of the market lies in this tendency to transform everything into resources. This potential exploitation is precisely what the “reclaiming of commons” fights against. Since the enclosure movement of the 17^th century, we progressively tend to consider things as property, which is something you can use, make revenue from, or sell. The social shock caused by the enclosure movement was obviously in opposition to reactions. Diggers were a dissident group with a program of reforming the existing social order through the creation of small, egalitarian rural communities. 

The Eating in Public movement takes on that legacy of opposing existing order and disrupting the capitalist systems around them. In 2003, Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma, O’ahu (the island of the Hawaïi archipelago), started planting papaya trees in an abandoned, unpleasant patch of weeds near their house. This transformation of shared spaces went on with many actions, such as recycling centers, seed-sharing stations, community gardens or free stores. For them, they are not inventing anything or initiating something they should be credited for. Comparable actions are taken in their community and internationally, with or without the direct influence of Eating in Public. 

SPE opened a free store on campus in November. This long-term project is, to some extent, a continuation of the Yard Sale logic. Many objects remain in everyone’s apartments without being used. Why not just give them away? One can give and take freely without any considerations other than ‘Do I really need this?’. That is, as long as everyone respects each other and follows basic rules: 1) No broken items, 2) Make sure objects are clean, 3) The store is neither a landfill nor a dumping station. This free store is the perfect way to make sure that an object will find the person who needs it, and the objects you need may well end up on the shelves of the store for you to take! Moreover, this action aims at questioning the market logic we live in. We are not in a TINA (there is no alternative) society; we can reconsider evidence and reclaim the commons. A free store on a campus is tiny indeed, but it is a makeshift experiment in mentality, a seed for new ideas to bloom.  

At the beginning of this month we were all still showing up to school in shorts and tank tops, living in some sort of surreal prolonged summer that felt both like a blessing and a concerningly stark reminder of the ever present and ominous climate crisis. Then suddenly that autumn we’d all been dreading (or longing for) came sweeping in with what felt like an ocean’s worth of rain and a small hurricane. If any of you experienced it as a sudden shift, that’s probably because it was. The temperature dropped ten degrees in two days, now I’m about as uneducated as you can get regarding weather phenomena but ten degrees sounds rather significant. Which raises the question, how are the students of SciencesPo Le Havre coping? Was this influx of autumn weather a welcome shift of pace amongst midterm stress or was having to suddenly figure out how your heating works the precise thing you didn’t need right now? 

I have to admit that I was expecting most of you to be of the latter opinion, that autumn crashing down over Le Havre, albeit not necessarily unexpectedly but definitely suddenly, offered nothing but inconveniences. However after having surveyed 40 SciencesPo Le Havre students, that didn’t quite seem to be the case. Only 15 of you answered that you wanted summer to keep going, whilst 25 said that autumn came either right on time or even should have started a few weeks ago. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m in complete agreement with the majority here. I’m a winter lover through and through and I truly believe that the best part about October and November is that they’re all stormy and cozy. So it was about time October stopped pretending to be august. 

That said, I was slightly surprised, especially since the survey was sent out after a certain sailing competition had forced many of us to lengthen our commute to school, prolonging the time we had to spend fighting the elements every day. And there were definitely those of you who voiced certain disgruntlement with the weather. Especially in regards to wind and its terrifying strength. However even with the difficulties of the wind threatening to blow half of us into the ocean on the way to school, you guys seem generally positive. Some even mentioning that the wind makes it sort of an accomplishment when you actually get places. So where is this positivity coming from? Or is it not positivity at all but rather a sign of climate anxiousness, where any further prolongment to summer would serve no other function than being further evidence of the (climate wise) dire future to come? 

Because I mean, heat waves in October in the northern hemisphere? It’s an anomaly. One that most scientists conclude to be an effect of human-induced climate change. Now there’s no doubt that the prolonged summer of 2023 is a mild example of climate change consequences compared to the fierce storms, floods and droughts that the world’s being hit with. But perhaps your responses can prove that mild or not, the weather’s helping us all stay reminded about the sometimes far-too-easy-to-forget global warming. Or maybe I’m reading far too much into this and all your responses really indicate that you’re as excited as I am about sweater weather, hot cups of tea and cuddling up under a blanket to watch a movie on a rainy day.

Lina EXERMAN 1AS spoke to us about the weather in Le Havre and her concerns about climate change.

Une grève générale a été annoncée le 13 octobre qui concerne une grande partie des syndicats et organisations de jeunesse ayant pour principales revendications des sujets concernant les droits sociaux des travailleurs, tels que les minimas sociaux, les salaires, ou encore l’égalité salariale hommes-femmes. C’est avec une grande déception que l’on peut admirer le manque de revendications environnementales dans les récents combats sociaux, alors que l’intersectionnalité de ces deux luttes ne cesse de se faire de plus en plus claire. Alors que l’on sait que la grève est une action fondamentalement écologique, qui permet de réduire la production et donc les émissions des activités humaines, et qui permet un temps de ralentissement dans un monde qui ne cesse de s’accélérer. 

C’est ainsi que l’on peut proposer la création d’un mouvement social et écologique qui se base sur l’utilisation de grève générale comme moyen de revendication de mesures écologiques. Par l’idée d’une grève écologique, j’entends tout au moins l’idée de cesser collectivement le travail pour avancer des revendications environnementales. C’est un concept déjà existant mais seulement au sein des jeunes et lycéens. On pourrait alors, au vue de l’impact mitigé de ces grèves étudiantes, se questionner sur l’efficacité d’une amplification de ce type de mouvement en une grève dite générale, voir plus généralement sur l’efficacité des moyens de contestation face à la crise climatique En effet, le lycéen qui ne va pas en cours ne change en rien son empreinte carbone tandis que l’ouvrier la réduit considérablement, que ce soit par le temps de trajet évité ou la nature de son activité. 

Nous pouvons imaginer potentiellement un mouvement de grève qui ait pour principale revendications des demandes élémentaires et évidentes pour lutter contre le réchauffement climatique. Des mesures non pas encore forcément révolutionnaires mais qui puissent ouvrir la voie pour le reste, pour une discussion et un vrai débat d’une envergure nouvelle sur la question climatique. Des mesures sans lesquelles la grève ne s’arrêterait pas. Je pense à des exemples comme les méga-bassines dont l’inefficacité et les coûts en font une solution désastreuse pour l’environnement, idée qui forme un consensus chez les scientifiques. Le changement de la production de produits volontairement programmé vers l’obsolescence rapide, c’est le cas de certains produits électroménagers, mais c’est aussi le cas de la fast fashion. Je pense également à la réduction des émissions produites par le secteur du numérique, par les milliers de data center qui consomment une quantité d’énergie ridiculement grande par rapport à ce qu’elle sert à collecter ou stocker, à savoir parfois des mails inutiles. Malheureusement rien ne nous dit que ces mouvements ne finiront pas comme les mouvements sociaux actuels, c’est-à-dire sans avoir gagné, si ce n’est que ce genre de mouvement sera tout de même une victoire pour la planète car elle aura vu les émissions se réduire pendant plusieurs jours au moins. Il n’y a donc rien à perdre. 

Nous pouvons toutefois imaginer d’autres alternatives dont l’efficacité est débattue. Par exemple, l’idée d’une non-coopération sociale ou économique est une solution également envisageable mais elle semble bien trop contrainte et inefficace. Elle s’incarne par exemple par la suspension de toute activité sociale ou sportive, les boycotts de consommateurs et producteurs, les retraits de dépôts des banques etc… L’idée étant de mettre une pression sur le système financier en menaçant de le déstabiliser. De sorte qu’un retrait massif des comptes bancaires serait très difficile à atteindre quand on sait que les plafonds de cartes oscillent entre 500 et 2000 euros. De même ce qu’on appelle les grèves de gratuité, qui consistent à ne rien faire payer aux consommateurs sont limités par la loi. Les contrôleurs de la SNCF sont par exemple obligés de contrôler et de faire payer car ne pas le faire représente aujourd’hui une faute grave.

Ainsi, nous voyons bien que les moyens légaux et démocratiques mis à notre disposition pour lutter contre l’inaction climatique des gouvernements est insuffisante face à l’urgence climatique, ce qui pose en contrepartie la question de la légitimité de la désobéissance civile voir de l’action violente comme moyens les plus efficaces de contestation en temps de crise. Plus largement cela nous questionne sur la réelle ou fictive possibilité pour les consommateurs même collectivement d’avoir un impact conséquent et positif sur le changement de paradigme nécessaire pour résoudre la crise climatique. Faut-il qu’individuellement nous mettions notre vie en danger pour faire réagir comme l’a fait Thomas Brail pour aller contre le projet de l’A 69. Ou pouvons nous démocratiquement nous faire entendre, cela semble être un horizon de moins en moins réaliste. Si le changement ne peut venir que des grands acteurs économiques et des États, alors nous saurons vers qui nous tourner quand viendra l’urgence, et nous saurons de qui le pouvoir doit être confisqué.

Artus HUET, étudiant en première année, nous fait part de son sujet de prédilection : l’écologie and social movement.