While Paris sizzles under exceptional heat, construction sites around the city are buzzing with building work on the venues for the Summer Olympics which the French capital will host in 2024.
The organising committee for the games has pledged they will be “climate positive”, meaning more carbon emissions will be offset than created by the event. For the construction of the athletes’ village, situated in the suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis to the north of the capital, the organisers’ requirements included that the buildings should be made largely of wood, that a green park area be created and that the infrastructure be highly energy efficient.
The construction of the village, like other sites, is led by a public body called the “Société de livraison des ouvrages olympiques”, or SOLIDEO, which is presided by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. Its board includes representatives of the games’ organising committee, the state, and local and regional authorities.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
All the companies involved in building the village were issued by the SOLIDEO with a document setting out its criteria for “environmental excellence”, and this included a ban on the use of timber “of tropical origin”. The protection of tropical forests is a key part of policies to counter climate change, and also for the defence of the rights of indigenous peoples in tropical regions.
The SOLIDEO’s prohibition of the use of wood of tropical and boreal origin prompted the ire of the Paris-based International Tropical Timber Technical Association, or ATIBT, a body which lobbies for the tropical timber industry. On its website, the ATIBT says it “promotes the development of a sustainable, ethical and legal industry of tropical timber as a natural and renewable resource, essential for the socio-economic development of producing countries”.
It sent a letter to Anne Hidalgo in April 2021, complaining about the SOLIDEO’s position, which it said “appeared to contravene the principle of free competition between products” and which was not based on “clearly defined” requirements for environmental protection. In short, the ATIBT argued that the move disregarded the industry’s provision of traceability of its production from sustainable forests.
Replying to the letter in July last year, the SOLIDEO’s executive general director Nicolas Ferrand, a civil servant, explained the ban on the use of tropical or boreal timber was in order “to reduce as much as possible the carbon impact of the works”, and that “the issue of the location of the sources of supplies”, and the “carbon impact of their transport to the construction site” was of “significant importance”.
But earlier this year, in an invitation to tender issued for the construction work on the exterior structures of the athletes’ village, the use of wood of tropical origin was finally allowed.
For the outside flooring the SOLIDEO even advised the choice of timber from the tali tree which grows in sub-Saharan Africa, notably in the Congo Basin region, and which is particularly resistant to humidity and insects. The tropical timber was also suggested as a possible choice for the outside furniture of the future park, and for the wooden flooring of public areas.
The invitation to tender also included the suggestion of another type of timber for inclusion in certain exterior structures. This was wood from the okan tree, a large and tall species which grows in dense and humid rain forests, notably in West Africa. It has difficulty regrowing after massive deforestation, and is regarded as a totem by some indigenous peoples.
In total, the ground surface area which may be covered with tali is 4,400 square metres, although that represents but a very small amount of the vast areas under construction for the 2024 games. In volume, the amount of tropical timber allowed would represent 200 cubic metres. The SOLIDEO insists that it allows locally sourced timber as an alternative for public areas.
“We are not fighting for a volume but for a symbol,” commented ATIBT director general Benoît Jobbé-Duval. “We wanted the door to be opened to a responsible consumption of wood coming from Central Africa.” The ATIBT announced its victory over the ban on tropical timber with a statement posted in June on its website , in which it thanked “all those who were mobilised to obtain this opening”, and who included “certified companies” and “the Congo Basin authorities”. Jobbé-Duval said he hoped the Olympic Games construction sites will bring “visibility and legibility” to the ATIBT’s cause.
But Sylvain Angerand, a forestry engineer and founder of French forest protection association Canopée-Forêts Vivantes, a member of the Global Forest Coalition, regretted the U-turn. “If the Olympic games [organisers] had stuck to the ban on tropical wood, it would have set a good example,” he said, adding that while the use of tali, an abundant species, does not raise particular concerns over conservation, the fragility and social value of okan makes its use questionable.
Intensive lobbying
The SOLIDEO requires any tropical wood used in the construction of the Olympic Village to be certified by the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), or the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), both of which promote biodiversity and sustainable forest management. However, in October last year, 34 NGOs, including Greenpeace, co-signed an open letter to the FSC expressing concern that it had failed its mission “in every major forested region on earth, at every stage of the supply chain from tropical to temperate and plantation forests”.
“We have heard accounts – from activists, whistleblowers, government officials, and insiders in the logging industry – of how FSC is failing to identify and address: corruption, logging in protected areas, large scale deforestation, disrespect of indigenous peoples’ rights and human rights abuses,” they continued. “Our focus on FSC has not been chosen but has been a natural consequence of our work. Increasingly, when we find suspect wood on sale in major markets like Europe and the US, it is FSC certified or being traded by FSC certified companies.”
While the volumes of French imports of tropical wood remain small, the transitions in the construction industry from measures to contain climate change have led to increasing use of forestry resources, and open up the potential for new markets. One of the aims of the ATIBT is to ensure that tropical timber companies are not excluded from these.
ATIBT’s director general Benoît Jobbé-Duval said he had “led action towards the SOLIDEO and the Paris City Hall” to “repair an error of appreciation”. This involved letters and email correspondence, and a video-conference call with SOLIDEO’s director of strategy and innovation, Antoine du Souich.
While the latter did not respond to questions submitted to him by Mediapart, a spokesperson for SOLIDEO confirmed those contacts, but detailed that “these exchanges were not organised in the framework of the preparation of a contract”. The spokesperson added that the companies responsible for the organisation of construction work “may have contacted numerous actors in the timber trade, among them ATIBT France” given the “very specific characteristics” of the timber in question, which is required to resist accumulations of water and mould.
In October 2021, Cameroon’s minister for forests and fauna, Jules Doret Ndongo, and the Republic of the Congo’s forest economy minister, Rosalie Matondo, held talks at Paris City Hall with Arnaud Ngatcha, a deputy to mayor Anne Hidalgo who is responsible for international relations. While Ngatcha also failed to respond to questions submitted to him by Mediapart, the ATIBT posted a detailed report of the meeting on its website.
It said the October 4th-8th visit to Paris by the two ministers was a “diplomatic mission” codenamed “Tropical Wood”, was “accompanied” by the ATIBT. The aim of the visit, and during which a meeting was also held at the French foreign affairs ministry, was “in order to put forward the environmental and social arguments allowing the SOLIDEO to reverse the decision to exclude tropical timber from the Olympic [construction] works”.
The report added that “City Hall indicated that it was not in a position to decide on a unilateral basis” any change to the environmental requirements in the construction of the sites, “but did not shut the door” on raising the issue “within the board of governors of SOLIDEO”.
Meanwhile, the ATIBT took part last September in a congress in the southern French port city of Marseille organised by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), which groups together governmental and non-governmental organisations. The ATIBT’s participation in the event, which the IUCN described as a “milestone for nature conservation and the development of a new global framework for biodiversity” was, said the lobbying group, “a moment of institutional recognition”.
Benoît Jobbé-Duval insisted that “sustainable management is one of the long-term solutions for saving the natural forests of central Africa”. In short, he argues that it is better to have some commercial use of the forest in order to valorise the economic benefit of the resource and to incite those involved to preserve it, and prevent de-forestation by agrobusinesses. “Sometimes, to save a thousand trees, two need to be cut down,” he said.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.