At the ONF, burnout, small savings and the climate revolution

To see it, you have to cross a forest of wooden columns, and pass under foliage, suspended from metal cables. There, in the center of the new headquarters of the National Forestry Office (ONF), sits an egg, the size of a human being, which some regulars keep watching, as if it would hatch as they pass. . The work, an oak barrel with invisible frames, was chosen by the management to celebrate its move.

What better than the symbol of birth to initiate renewal? In addition to their new premises in Maisons-Alfort – 2000 square meters of exposed beams, spruce, pine and oak, on the outskirts of Paris, inaugurated last November – the ONF’s administrative executives have inherited a new ambition. Make the institution an “outpost of adaptation and mitigation” of climate change. A challenge for the public establishment, created in 1965, and mired in a deep social crisis since the 2000s.

In the program ? Strengthen firefighting in central and eastern France, newly affected – 62,000 hectares burned in France in 2022, a record. Plant 1 billion trees before 2030, to improve carbon storage, an announcement by Emmanuel Macron last October. But also: trying to identify the species that will survive in 2050. An emergency: the rate of wood decline has quadrupled since 2017. 50 million euros were announced in November for this program. All led by a new director general: Valérie Metrich-Hecquet, a regular in the ministries.

Restore the luster of the Office

Eager to show that restoring the luster of the Office is one of his priorities, while the images of the Landes in flames have revived the idea of ​​a “public climate service”, the Minister of Ecology Christophe Béchu supports , for L’Express: “The year 2022 marks a tipping point, it is the beginning of a new era for the establishment. And in relation to the importance that forests and the ONF take and will take , we don’t talk about it enough!” This is the institution, erected as a knight of the climate…

What give it a new lease of life? “The fires have given us some publicity, it feels like a new period is opening, but our public service is going to be hard to repair, and the tasks difficult to reconcile”, warns Samuel George, a unionized forester from forty years. In green clothes, he walks through the former ONF training center in Velaine-en-Haye, in Meurthe-et-Moselle. Of this high place, symbol of the splendor of yesteryear, there remains only the mark left by the three letters, when they were proudly displayed on the highest point of the site. The management closed it in 2015, to save money.

In the 2000s, the State carried out major reforms, aimed in particular at reducing its expenditure. Workforce reduced by 40% in twenty years, use of contract workers, increase in administrative tasks, larger area to cover… The unions denounce degraded working conditions, conflicting orders, and “creeping privatization”, despite the forest. “The measures have only one goal: to transform the ONF into an operator”, regrets Patrice Martin, secretary general of SNUPFEN Solidaires.

Savings… at the expense of the forest?

While the State no longer supports the retirement pension of its employees since 2016, the ONF had to find more income, and a new balance, which does not always rhyme with ecological management. In fifty years, timber harvesting in state forests has increased by 35%, according to a Senate report, published in June 2019. The same year, the former director general of the NFB, Christian Dubreuil, left his post prematurely, in the face of the anger of the staff, annoyed at what they considered to be “brutal production”.

A state of health and an economic model that raise questions in view of the complexity of the climate challenge: “We are asking the ONF to be profitable, therefore to focus on the production and cutting of wood. New climate missions, c It’s good, but the institution can no longer fully assume the protection of the forest,” said Bruno Doucet of the NGO Canopée, close to foresters. The activist stresses that it is difficult for foresters to oppose certain practices out of concern for the forest, because they are less and less civil servants, but under private law status.

The ONF has at least obtained a freeze on its workforce for 2023. In its 2021-2025 roadmap, the government planned to cut 500 more positions. The agreement was not renegotiated, despite the publication of a Senate report in August 2022, asking to give “leeway” to the Office, after the fires. “We are going to have to do more, with so much, while cases of burnout are numerous, and there have been more than 50 suicides since 2005”, laments Patrice Martin. The union ensures that in most cases of overwork, the victims had warned of an excessive workload, or of a form of tension between two imperatives: to ensure the health of the forest and to fulfill the objectives of the institution.

Make it greener, with as many

Silviculture and ecological forest management have yet to be invented. Vast project, which will not be done without a refurbishment from top to bottom of the institution, believes the union. Asked about possible increases in staff as the climate crisis requires efforts, the Minister of Agriculture tempers: “The increase in power of the ONF’s missions must indeed be accompanied by additional means, which can pass through staff reinforcements, but we are still attentive to the general financial balance”.

And Marc Fesneau to point out that the establishment has already received 50 million euros from the recovery plan, in 2021 and 2022. These funds, added to a French wood which is selling more expensive with the war in Ukraine, should bring the result net of the public establishment to 27 million euros in 2022, announced the leaders, a record. Enough to lighten the institution’s debt a little, which amounted to 440 million euros at the end of 2021. But already, the storm is looming on the horizon: the ONF expects results much less favorable in 2023.