The race for Paris: Why France’s capital has likely gone green for good

If there’s one thing that every candidate in the city’s upcoming mayoral election seems to agree on, it’s this: for better or worse, a quarter-century of left-wing rule has changed Paris beyond recognition.

For the outgoing administration of Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo, the fruits of the city’s green transformation brook no argument.

Carbon emissions have dropped by almost a third since 2004, and major air pollutants by half over roughly the same period. A city known for its densely packed Hausmmannian apartment blocks has witnessed the planting of some 150,000 trees since 2020 as of March 2026 – though almost a third of these have apparently been replacements for those struck down over the years.

Perhaps the most obvious change, to visitors and locals alike, has been the heavy reduction in the amount of traffic heaving its way across the city: the number of cars in circulation has dropped by more than half since 2004, largely due to a series of policies by the city’s Socialist mayors to prioritise pedestrians and cyclists.

Nowhere does this transformation feel more complete than along the banks of the Seine that carves the city in two. More than a decade ago, Hidalgo’s predecessor Bertrand Delanoë banned cars from the winding river’s left bank for the first time since the 1960s. 

The measure was fiercely opposed by the city’s right-wing opposition – including the mayor of the wealthy 7^th arrondissement, Rachida Dati, who polls now put within striking distance of the Hôtel de Ville. In the years that followed, Dati and her allies continued to campaign against the pedestrianisation of the river’s right bank, the Pont d’Iena and swathes of the city centre.

Today’s Dati, by contrast, is unrecognisable. Preaching what she calls a “pragmatic environmentalism”, she is running on the promise to preserve Paris’s 200,000 trees, enrich the capital with 500 new green belts and create “oases of freshness” by stripping away asphalt in favour of grass-lined cobblestones. Above all, she says, she will put the Parisian pedestrian “at the heart of her campaign”.

Going green

The conservative former culture minister is not the only one on the right who has changed their tune on a greener Paris. 

Far-right National Rally candidate Thierry Mariani has pledged to plant another 50,000 trees, in particular in Paris’s school courtyards. The promise to green the capital’s schools is shared by most of the other candidates, including the centre-right Pierre-Yves Bournazel, who also champions the revitalisation of the 36-kilometre “Petite ceinture” – a disused railway looping around Paris – with family-friendly green spaces and dog parks.

Even the steady pedestrianisation of Paris has found almost unanimous support among the different rivals. Once howled down by the right as overly hostile to cars and the people who drive them, the policy is now widely welcomed by Parisians – particularly the 300-odd streets in front of schools that have been restricted to pedestrians in the past five years. Bournazel has proposed extending the measure to 626 schools if elected.

Not to be outdone, Hidalgo’s former deputy Emmanuel Grégoire – the head of a left-wing coalition including the Greens and the Communist Party, and the narrow favourite ahead of the first round of voting Sunday – has said that he will create 1,000 new pedestrian-only streets and 300 new hectares of public gardens. His team has also outlined more sweeping changes including a leafy 25-kilometre promenade stretching across both banks of the Seine and a city-spanning green belt following Paris’s Périphérique ring road.

Hard-left candidate Sophia Chikirou is pushing for the greening of 40 percent of the capital’s territory by 2032 and the linking of Paris’s Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes by a green belt open to cyclists and pedestrians alike.  

Only far-right candidate Sarah Knafo is bucking the trend. The 32-year-old is pledging to reopen the banks of the Seine to cars, raise the speed limit on the capital’s ring road back to 80km/h and drastically reduce the steep costs of parking your car in Paris. Even these measures, it must be said, are framed within the context of reducing the city’s environmental impact, with Knafo stressing that a car on the move pollutes three times less than one stuck in traffic.

A sense of crisis

Nathalie Blanc, director of research at the National Centre for Scientific research and director of the Earth Politics Centre, said that Parisians were largely convinced by the urgency imposed by the climate crisis. 

“One of the first things we’ve seen is the acceleration of climate change and the population's acceptance of this narrative, as well as the need for collective adaptation – particularly in cities,” she said. “As recent work by the Shift Project [a think tank advocating a transition to a post-carbon economy] has shown, environmental integration and the need to take climate change into account are widely supported at the local level, in a context where national policies remain largely insufficient.”

Nor is the ongoing environmental collapse the distant or abstract threat it once seemed. Reeling from a series of worsening heat waves, city officials have recently begun to model how the city would cope once summer temperatures rise to 50 degrees – something that climate scientists warn is a real possibility over the next century. The answer was alarming, and unsurprising: not well. 

Blanc said that environmental policies pushed by city officials were increasingly built not just around keeping carbon emissions down, but better preparing Paris to deal with the consequences of a warming world.

“In a context where adaptation remains the poor relation of climate policies even as greenhouse gas emission mitigation has benefited from considerable investment over the last few decades, some public policies have gone beyond the strict logic of mitigation – often perceived as a restrictive, even punitive, ecological injunction, and deemed ineffective given the scale of emissions from the Chinese and North American economies – to more explicitly integrate territorial adaptation issues.”

Quality-of-life

But while the climate crisis still looms large in the public imagination, many of the environmental measures put into place across France’s cities are rooted in more down-to-earth needs.

A report released by the Shift Project last month polling mayors and other municipal-level elected officials across France found that local representatives were increasingly framing environmental measures as concrete quality-of-life improvements for residents rather than a broader push away from fossil fuels.

More than three-quarters of those polled listed safeguarding their constituents’ health or quality of life as one of the main motivating factors of their support for environmental policies, with lowering their energy costs following closely behind. The report found overwhelming support among elected officials for practical measures including renovating apartments to make them more energy-efficient and investing in public transport or pedestrian-friendly infrastructure.

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“Certain measures stand out for their double effectiveness in terms of mitigation and adaptation,” Blanc said. “This is particularly the case for the greening of urban spaces, which is widely accepted by society, and the thermal renovation of buildings, which simultaneously contributes to reducing emissions, improving comfort, and increasing resilience to heat waves.”

But she stressed that not all of this support came from concern over how to best shield the city’s most vulnerable people from the extremes unleashed by the climate crisis.

“Beyond these specific considerations, the greening of cities also corresponds to a process of gentrification, to the extent that neighbourhoods bordering green spaces can see their value increase,” she said. “For wealthy property owners, this can be a reason to approve this type of development. But from a quality-of-life perspective, this greening of cities also brings with it a renewed focus on collective well-being.”