French activists fill golf course holes with cement in protest at watering exemptions

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French activists fill golf course holes with cement in protest at watering exemptions

By Martyn Herman

Paris: Climate activists affiliated with Extinction Rebellion have targeted golf courses in southern France, filling holes with concrete in protest over exemptions from water restrictions during one of the worst droughts on record.

France has told residents to avoid non-essential water usage like car-washing and watering gardens. However, activists complain that golf courses are allowed to continue watering greens.

Extinction Rebellion Toulouse posted pictures of protesters cementing golf holes and tearing up grass on the greens.  

Extinction Rebellion Toulouse posted pictures of protesters cementing golf holes and tearing up grass on the greens.  Credit: Twitter

The protest action took place at the Vieille-Toulouse club and also at the Garonne des Sept Deniers course.

Defending their exemption from the water restrictions, Gerard Rougier of the French Golf Federation told the France Info news website: “A golf course without a green is like an ice-rink without ice.” He said golf courses employed more than 15,000 people across France.

Officials say that without water the greens would die within three days.

Extinction Rebellion Toulouse posted a photograph on Twitter apparently showing a golf hole filled with cement and a sign saying “This hole is drinking 277,000 litres. Do you drink that much? #Stop Golf”.

French protesters have been outraged at water exemptions for golf courses during the European drought.

French protesters have been outraged at water exemptions for golf courses during the European drought.Credit: Getty Images

A petition aimed at scrapping the exemption enjoyed by French golf courses during drought said: “Economic madness takes precedence over ecological reason.”

Water bans are enforced at the discretion of regional officials and so far only Ille-et-Villaine in western France had banned the watering of golf courses. Some regions require that less than a third of usual water quantities be used, and that watering be done at night.

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France had been one of the hardest hit by the hot and dry conditions across Europe with firefighters battling a “monster” blaze in forests in the south-west France.

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From dry and cracked reservoirs in Spain to falling water levels on major arteries like the Danube, the Rhine and the Po, the unprecedented drought is afflicting nearly half of Europe.

There has been no significant rainfall for almost two months in the continent’s western, central and southern regions. In typically rainy Britain, the government officially declared a drought across southern and central England on Friday amid one of the hottest and driest summers on record.

Europe’s dry period is expected to continue in what experts say could be the worst drought in 500 years.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre warned this week that drought conditions will get worse and potentially affect 47 per cent of the continent.

Andrea Toreti, a senior researcher at the European Drought Observatory, said a drought in 2018 was so extreme that there were no similar events for the last 500 years, “but this year, I think, it is really worse”.

For the next three months, “we see still a very high risk of dry conditions over Western and Central Europe, as well as the UK,” Toreti said.

Current conditions result from long periods of dry weather caused by changes in world weather systems, said meteorologist Peter Hoffmann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research near Berlin.

“It’s just that in summer we feel it the most,” he said. “But actually the drought builds up across the year.”

Reuters

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