France’s environmental agency has said that Marseille Airport’s expansion plans have “underestimated the environmental impact and overestimated the socio-economic benefits,” reports Business Traveller.
France has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050, a commitment which was written into law in June.
London-based Foster and Partners won a bid to design the Marseille Airport Terminal 1 extension in 2017.
Plans involve the creation of the “Coeur” (meaning “heart” in French), a 22-metre-high glazed hall merging the arrival and departure halls into one single building. The first phase of the project, scheduled for the start of 2023, plans to link the original Fernand Pouillon-designed 1960s building with the 1990s extension designed by Richard Rogers.
A second phase scheduled for 2027 involves the creation of a new pier with 12 aerobridges, aiming to increase the terminal’s capacity to 12 million passengers per year.
But a report from the French Autorité Environnementale (AE) issued on July 29 states that while the “study is generally well documented” it “presents major methodological flaws in the definition of the study scenarios,” with the airport attributing to it achievements “which aren’t entirely linked to it.”