Environmental Injustice in France

Abstract

This paper presents the first national study on environmental inequalities in France. It applies the Anglo-American concept of environmental justice, focusing on the distribution of environmental burdens, to the French setting and tests the hypothesis that poor and immigrant communities are disproportionately exposed to environmental risks. The location of eight types of hazardous sites (industrial and nuclear sites, incinerators, waste management facilities) and the socio-economic characteristics of populations are associated at the commune, or town, level for all 36 600 French towns. The analysis, descriptive and multivariate, uses simple and spatial regression techniques. It shows that towns with high proportions of immigrants tend to host more hazardous sites, even controlling for population size, income, degree of industrialization of the town and region. The study establishes the presence of environmental inequities in France and raises new public policy questions. However, it does not investigate the mechanisms that may explain inequities, which could include procedural injustices, land market dynamics and historical patterns of industrial and urban development.

Acknowledgements

This study participates in the project ‘Inequalities in morbidity and mortality’ (‘Inégalités devant la maladie et la mort’) of the Research Unit ‘Mortality, Health and Epidemiology’ of the Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques (INED). The author wishes to thank France Meslé and Jacques Véron, researchers at INED for their support, as well as Amandine Weber and Tim Sexton who helped with the databases and cartography. Thanks are also due to the Center Maurice Halbwachs which provided the census data, and the personnel of the Institut Français de l'Environnement, Agence de la Maîtrise de l'Energie and of the Ministère de l'Ecologie et du Développement Durable who provided the environmental data.

Notes

1 Prefects are the heads of departments. Metropolitan France is administratively divided into 35 600 communes in 95 departments and 22 regions.

2 Data are also available on air quality (only for cities with more than 100 000 residents) and on drinking and swimming waters (ADEME, IFEN).

3 In French: Sites et sols pollués ou potentiellement pollués appelant une action des pouvoirs publics, à titre préventif ou curatif.

4 The average per capita number of sites for all towns is 10.6% with a high standard deviation of 33.1%. This per capita rate is not used in the analysis because it is much more affected by the size of the town (denominator) than by the number of sites (numerator). It is high only for small towns with many sites, but remains equally low for towns with few sites and large towns with numerous sites.

5 Four additional towns were excluded: three with approximately 300 residents and average incomes about 15 times the standard deviation, and one with 160 residents and a proportion of residents born abroad above 50%.

6 When the proportion of those born abroad is excluded from these models, the regression coefficients for all other exogenous variables keep the same direction and significance level. The proportion of variance that is explained decreases to R² = 0.33 for the model predicting the total number of sites. That is, the proportion of persons born abroad contributes to 1% of the total variance, or 3% of the explained variance in the total number of sites.