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France faces anger over planned wind farm next to Australian WWI memorial

Opponents of a wind farm planned next to a battlefield in France where hundreds of Australian soldiers died during World War I are urging the government to cancel the plan, calling it an affront to the memory of the dead.

France faces anger over planned wind farm next to Australian WWI memorial
The Australia - New Zealand military cemetery in Villers-Bretonneux in 2018. Photo: ​FRANCOIS NASCIMBENI / AFP.

Politicians and campaigners have spent years trying to overturn plans for turbines next to World War I killing fields in northern France, where around 10,000 Australians were among hundreds of thousands killed and wounded.

In 2017, Australian officials expressed relief after French state electricity company Engie pulled the plug on a wind farm project in Bullecourt, site of two battles that were particularly deadly for the Australians.

The firm said at the time that the negative reaction – not least from the French state – had underscored the site’s “sacredness”.

The same year, French authorities rejected plans for another wind farm next to Australia’s national war memorial in Villers-Bretonneux, close to President Emmanuel Macron’s hometown of Amiens, saying it would be a blot on the landscape.

But in March this year, an appeal court in the town of Douai overturned that decision and gave wind energy company Les Vents de Picardie the green light to proceed with the farm around five kilometres from the memorial.

The case has become a cause celebre among local politicians, who are piling pressure on Macron to take the fight to France’s top courts.

“We cannot accept that the transition to green energy, which is necessary, be given precedence over the memory of, and respect for the dead,” Christophe Coulon, vice-president of the Hauts-de-France region, told AFP in a telephone interview.

“It’s a moral issue,” said Coulon, who held a press conference with two other prominent local politicians at the memorial site on Thursday.

But the government has so far refused to contest the decision.

A Agrave at the Australian War Memorial in the northern French city of Villers-Bretonneux in 2019. Photo: PHILIPPE HUGUEN / AFP.

Ecology minister Barbara Pompili’s office told AFP last month it was not generally opposed to the idea of wind turbines being visible from memorial sites, so would not refer the case to higher courts.

Villers-Bretonneux marks the site of one of Australia’s greatest World War I victories when Australian troops encircled the village and retook it from German forces, some 1,200 dying the fight.

Every year, a small Anzac Day ceremony is held at the site, which is one of the first stop-offs in France for many Australian tourists.

‘An affront’

The memorial, which is next to a military cemetery, has a tower surrounded by walls and panels inscribed with the names of the 10,732 Australian troops who died in France with no known grave.

“We will never forget our history and the ultimate sacrifice made by the Australians,” said Stephane Haussoulier, president of the Somme area, who joined Coulon at the press conference.

He views the prospect of wind turbines looming over the site as an “affront to our Australian comrades”.

The campaign has tapped into simmering resentment in northern France over the growing numbers of wind turbines looming on the horizon.

Many northerners complain that their region is being saddled with a disproportionate number of the wind farms needed to help France slash its carbon emissions.

An arch-rival of Macron who has announced a bid to become president next year on a centre-right ticket, Xavier Bertrand, joined the fray last month.

In a letter to the government he warned that the wind farm risked “harming the character” of the Villers-Bretonneux memorial, “not to mention the feeling of being hemmed in”.

In 2017, Canberra was fulsome in its praise of France’s efforts to preserve the memory of its fallen soldiers.

Then veteran affairs minister Dan Tehan, now in charge of trade and tourism, said that the campaign against the Bullecourt wind farm showed “how the French still, 100 years on, take so importantly what Australians were prepared to do for them”.

Asked for comment about the Villers-Bretonneux project, the Australian embassy in Paris on Thursday declined to make a statement.

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‘Città 30’: Which Italian cities will bring in new speed limits?

Bologna has faced heavy criticism - including from the Italian government - after introducing a speed limit of 30km/h, but it's not the only city to approve these rules.

'Città 30': Which Italian cities will bring in new speed limits?

Bologna on January 17th became Italy’s first major city to introduce a speed limit of 30km/h on 70 percent of roads in the city centre under its ‘Città 30’ plan, first announced in 2022, and initially set to come into force by June 2023.

The move made Bologna one of a growing number of European cities, including Paris, Madrid, Brussels, and Bilbao, to bring in a 30km/h limit aimed at improving air quality and road safety.

But the change was met last week with a go-slow protest by Bologna’s taxi drivers and, perhaps more surprisingly, criticism from the Italian transport ministry, which financed the measure.

Matteo Salvini, who is currently serving as Italy’s transport minister, this week pledged to bring in new nationwide rules dictating speed limits in cities that would reverse Bologna’s new rule.

Salvini’s League party has long criticised Bologna’s ‘Città 30’ plan, claiming it would make life harder for residents as well as people working in the city and would create “more traffic and fines”.

OPINION: Italians and their cars are inseparable – will this ever change?

Bologna’s speed limit has sparked a heated debate across Italy, despite the increasingly widespread adoption of such measures in many other cities in Europe and worldwide in recent years.

While Bologna is the biggest Italian city to bring in the measure, it’s not the first – and many more local authorities, including in Rome, are now looking to follow their example in the next few years.

Some 60 smaller cities and towns in Italy have adopted the measure so far, according to Sky TG24, though there is no complete list.

This compares to around 200 French towns and cities to adopt the rule, while in Spain the same limit has applied to 70 percent of all the country’s roads since since May 2021 under nationwide rules, reports LA7.

The first Italian town to experiment with a 30 km/h speed limit was Cesena, south of Bologna, which introduced it in 1998. Since then, the local authority has found that serious accidents have halved, while the number of non-serious ones has remained unchanged.

Olbia, in Sardinia, also famously introduced the speed limit in 2021.

The city of Parma is planning to bring in the same rules from 2024, while the Tuscan capital of Florence approved five 30km/h zones in the city centre earlier this month.

Turin is set to bring in its first 30km/h limits this year as part of its broader plan to improve transport infrastructure, aimed at reducing smog and increasing livability.

READ ALSO: Why electric cars aren’t more popular in Italy

Meanwhile, the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, has promised to introduce the limit on 70 percent of the capital’s roads by the end of his mandate, which expires in 2026.

In Milan, while the city council has voted in favour of lower speed limits and other traffic limitations on central roads, it’s not clear when these could come into force.

Milan mayor Beppe Sala this week said a 30 km/h limit would be “impossible” to implement in the Lombardy capital.

And it’s notable that almost all of the cities looking at slowing down traffic are in the north or centre-north of Italy.

There has been little interest reported in the measures further south, where statistics have shown there are a higher number of serious road accidents – though the total number of accidents is in fact higher in the north.

According to the World Health Organisation the risk of death to a pedestrian hit by a car driven at 50 km/h is 80 percent. The risk drops to 10 percent at 30 km/h.

The speed limit on roads in Italian towns and cities is generally 50, and on the autostrade (motorways) it’s up to 130.

Many Italian residents are heavily dependent on cars as their primary mode of transport: Italy has the second-highest rate of car ownership in Europe, with 670 vehicles per 1,000 residents, second only to Luxembourg with 682, according to statistics agency Eurostat.

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