Since the promulgation of the Climate and Resilience Law and the stipulation of a zero net artificialization (ZAN) objective for 2050, there have been many discussions on the interpretation of this law, particularly around the term renaturation . In the law, the term is defined on the one hand by a qualitative component that refers to the ecological functions of the soil. Renaturation is thus understood as the improvement or restoration of these. On the other hand, the text of the law indicates that this qualitative improvement of the soil results from the transformation of an artificialized surface into a non-artificialized surface. Indeed, the zero net objective by 2050 means that from this date, the newly artificialized and deartificialized surfaces, i.e. renatured, must balance each other. However, this binary distribution of areas between "artificialized" and "non-artificialized" does not take into account qualitative criteria, since only land occupation and use are taken into account in the assessment. While the law clearly describes renaturation as a qualitative revaluation of soils, it does not specify that this is the condition for transforming an artificial surface into a non-artificial surface.
The evolution of the concept of renaturation over the last 20 years
Faced with this paradox, doubts sweden phone number list remain as to the meaning of the term renaturation beyond a modification of land cover and/or type of use. These doubts are accentuated by the lack of a clear definition of renaturation in the scientific world. Thus, a large number of scientific publications highlight the diversity of interpretations, linked to the appropriation of the term by a growing number of different actors for increasingly numerous and varied projects. If in the 2000s, the term was still largely defined in the context of the rehabilitation of river ecosystems, from the mid-2010s, the discourse gradually shifted towards an urban context, until, since the proclamation of the ZAN objective, a majority of French-speaking scientific texts define renaturation in this context.