In a new study, scientists proposed adding a Category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to describe stronger hurricanes linked to global warming.
The study titled “The growing inadequacy of an open-ended Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale in a warming world” and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted that global warming and rising ocean temperatures were contributing to stronger hurricanes.
The climate scientists behind the study, Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and James Kossin of First Street Foundation, wrote that tropical cyclones have become so intense amid global warming that a higher category may be necessary to convey the greater dangers of more powerful storms.
The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale has been used for over five decades, ranking hurricanes from Category 1 to Category 5. As the study authors noted, the highest category, Category 5, has no upper limit; instead it encompasses hurricanes with wind speeds of 157 mph or more. According to the scale, a Category 5 hurricane includes a risk of “catastrophic damage” that will destroy framed homes, fell trees and lead to long-lasting power outages.
But the scientists pointed out that greater wind speeds do increase intensity and risk that could be better explained with an additional category.
“Our motivation is to reconsider how the open-endedness of the Saffir-Simpson Scale can lead to underestimation of risk, and, in particular, how this underestimation becomes increasingly problematic in a warming world,” Wehner said in a statement.
The proposal would define Category 5 storms from 70 to 80 m/s (about 157 to 192 mph), then add a Category 6 ranking for storms with winds over 192 mph. The proposed Category 6 could already apply to previous tropical storms, including Typhoon Haiyan, Hurricane Patricia, Typhoon Goni and Typhoon Meranti.
The study revealed that the risk of storms that could be categorized in the proposed Category 6 would increase by 50% around the Philippines and doubles around the Gulf of Mexico if global warming reaches 2°C compared to preindustrial levels. Overall, the study authors found that the risk of storms with an intensity that could rank as Category 6 has more than doubled since 1979.
“Tropical cyclone risk messaging is a very active topic, and changes in messaging are necessary to better inform the public about inland flooding and storm surge, phenomena that a wind-based scale is only tangentially relevant to. While adding a sixth category to the Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale would not solve that issue, it could raise awareness about the perils of the increased risk of major hurricanes due to global warming,” Kossin explained. “Our results are not meant to propose changes to this scale, but rather to raise awareness that the wind-hazard risk from storms presently designated as Category 5 has increased and will continue to increase under climate change.”
A super-hurricane is brewing in the Atlantic Ocean in the opening pages of The Displacements, a novel by Bruce Holsinger published in 2022. “This is the one the climatologists have been warning us about for twenty years,” one character declares. Forty pages in, so-called Hurricane Luna makes a surprise turn for Miami and ends up demolishing Southern Florida with a wall of water, buckling skyscrapers, leveling wastewater plants, and filling the Everglades with contaminated silt. With 215-mile-per-hour winds, faster than a severe tornado, the fictional Luna is the world’s first Category 6 hurricane.
In the real world, Category 5 is synonymous with the biggest and baddest storms. But some U.S. scientists are making the case that it no longer captures the intensity of recent hurricanes. A paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lays out a framework for extending the current hurricane-rating system, the Saffir-Simpson scale, with a new category for storms that have winds topping 192 miles per hour. According to the study, the world has already seen storms that would qualify as Category 6s.
“We expected that climate change was going to make the winds of the most intense storms stronger,” said Michael Wehner, a coauthor of the paper and an extreme weather researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “What we’ve demonstrated here is that, yeah, it’s already happening. We tried to put numbers on how much worse it’ll get.”
There’s a reason that books like The Displacements invoke Category 6: It grabs your attention, warning of a threat that’s like nothing you’ve never encountered. The concept could help the public grapple with the dangers that climate change is bringing, like more intense storms. But some experts aren’t convinced it would be helpful to work “Category 6” into our hurricane vocabularies.
What storms would count as a Category 6?
The idea of adding a Category 6 hassurfacedseveraltimes in the last few decades, as storms like Hurricane Dorian in 2019 delivered some of the highest wind speeds on record (185 miles per hour) and flattened whole towns in the Bahamas. The current Category 5 designation refers to any tropical cyclone with wind speeds higher than 157 miles per hour.
The new threshold of 192 miles per hour for a Category 6 would have captured some of the strongest storms ever observed. Wehner and his coauthor James Kossin, a scientist at the climate nonprofit First Street Foundation, found that at least five storms have already reached this tier, and that all of them occurred in the last decade, a signal that a warming world is creating more monster storms. The most powerful of these gales, Hurricane Patricia, slammed into Mexico’s Pacific Coast in 2015 with winds that peaked at 215 miles per hour. By a stroke of good fortune, the storm hit a relatively unpopulated region, causing only six deaths. When another one of the most powerful storms, Typhoon Haiyan, struck the Philippines in 2013 with winds of 195 miles per hour, it killed more than 6,000 people, making it one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.
The Gulf of Mexico hasn’t seen a storm with such high winds in the modern era, but the authors found that conditions in the region are already ripe for a Category 6. That’s because climate change is making the ocean and atmosphere warmer, providing fuel for more intense hurricanes. By undertaking an analysis of atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic, Wehner and Kossin found that there have been several occasions when the Gulf has been hot enough to support a storm with winds of more than 190 miles per hour — it’s just dumb luck that one hasn’t happened yet. As the world gets hotter, the odds that we’ll see such a storm get higher: The authors find that 2 degrees Celsius of warming would triple the risk of a Category 6 storm forming in the Atlantic in any given year.
The pitfalls of adding a new category
It’s becoming clear that flooding is the deadliest aspect of a hurricane. Storm surges account for roughly half of deaths from hurricanes in the United States, and flooding from heavy rain is responsible for more than a quarter, according to the study. By contrast, high winds are behind just 8 percent of deaths. Since the Saffir-Simpson scale is based solely on the speed of their winds, it doesn’t communicate the risks that people should be most concerned about, yet it’s the main thing people usually know about an oncoming storm.
“The point is, adding a Category 6 just amplifies the miscommunication of the greatest hurricane risks,” said Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia.
Floodwaters isolate homes in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in 2018 in Lumberton, North Carolina.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
The public is already confused by the jargon in hurricane forecasts, like the “cone of uncertainty” that shows a storm’s projected path, or the difference between a “watch” and a “warning.” Shepherd thinks adding a new category could make that worse.
“You know, people are creatures of habit,” he said. “They have been conditioned to believe that Cat 5 is the strongest hurricane. ‘OK, now, well, what are the categories?’ To me, it creates a lot more communication inconsistencies and confusion for the public.”
People often base their evacuation decisions on a storm’s Saffir-Simpson category, according to Jennifer Collins, a professor of geoscience at the University of South Florida. When Hurricane Florence was downgraded from a Category 4 to Category 1 before its landfall in the Carolinas in 2018, people who had evacuated actually turned around and came back, encountering severe flooding as a result, Collins said.
“When they hear Category 5, I think people will react to it,” Collins said. “It’s really when we use those lower categories that people are not reacting when they should.” National Hurricane Center experts have said in the past that adding a new category wouldn’t do much good, since a Category 5 is already considered catastrophic. Since the National Hurricane Center is in charge of the Saffir-Simpson scale, Category 6 won’t happen unless those experts are convinced it’s needed.
The authors of the new paper don’t think that extending the category system would fix these hurricane-communication problems. “We’re not trying to address these other inadequacies,” Wehner said. “We’re trying to raise awareness that climate change is increasing the risk of intense storms, and not just Category 6, but also category 4 and 5.”
While it’s difficult to predict exactly how people would respond to a Category 6 storm, Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, thinks the designation would be helpful. “It would send a clear signal to coastal residents that your past experience with storms is not a good measure of future impacts,” Marlon said in an email. “Storms are no longer ‘all natural,’ and they’re getting stronger.”
A better way to communicate hurricane risks?
These days, when a hurricane is headed toward the coast, Shepherd doesn’t talk much about its category at all. Instead, he focuses on explaining threats from storm surge and flooding, sharing visuals that show the risks.
Over the last decade, the National Hurricane Center has been experimenting with new storm surge maps that highlight the risk of inland flooding rather than the wind speed of a storm. In the lead-up to hurricanes like Ian in 2022, for instance, the agency published new mapsevery few hours that showed how many feet of flooding will hit each segment of the coast. These maps are simple and easy to understand, and they’ve become a more central part of the NHC’s attempts to communicate storm risk in recent years.
A map shows the peak storm surge forecast ahead of Hurricane Ian’s landfall in 2022. NOAA / National Weather Service
“We likely have entered a new generation of hurricanes, in terms of intensity and rapid intensification,” Shepherd said. “I don’t want to downplay or underplay that, because that’s critical. So instead of worrying about characterizing a new category, my broader message is, ‘OK, what are we going to do, from an adaptation and a resiliency standpoint, to this new generation of hurricanes?’”
As states across the country roll back how much they pay rooftop-solar owners for the surplus electricity they send back to the grid, Puerto Rico is bucking the trend, protecting its generous solar credits until at least the end of the decade.
California, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, and North Carolina have all taken recent steps to change or get rid of these payments, which are known as net metering. But Governor Pedro Pierluisi signed a bill last month extending the U.S. territory’s program. The reason, advocates say, is that net metering is too essential to the archipelago’s clean energy goals, and the security of its people.
“It is our responsibility to promote the transformation of our electricity system and promote any initiative that aims to avoid: the excessive dependence on fossil fuels, environmental pollution and increasing the effects of climate change,” the law states.
Net metering plays an important role in boosting solar’s popularity. Systems can cost between $10,000 and $20,000 on average, and even more when they include battery storage. The savings earned by selling excess energy offsets those costs, and helps the system pay for itself over time.
“It provides an incentive for people to go solar, and without it it’s just a lot more challenging financially,” Joseph Wyer, a policy analyst at the solar data firm Ohm Analytics, told Grist.
States typically adopt net metering policies to promote the technology’s uptake. “If the net metering policy is stable, then the growth of the market should be a lot more stable, too,” said Wyer.
But utilities that favor reducing or eliminating this compensation argue that the credits granted to homeowners are often overvalued, and that the policy passes on the costs of operating the grid to households that don’t have solar. The policy tends to attract scrutiny once an area reaches a certain level of solar penetration. When California regulators unanimously voted in 2022 to slash credits by 75 percent, they said the subsidy was no longer needed to propel the technology’s adoption.
Those pushing to move on from net metering say doing so will help spur battery adoption, and the way to recoup one’s investment on solar panels will shift from selling excess electricity to storing it in a home battery and using that energy at night rather than paying for power from the grid. In Hawaiʻi, the percentage of projects that included battery storage increased from less than 15 percent to more than 80 after it cut its solar credits in 2015, according to Ohm Analytics.
Net-metering proponents argue that eliminating the benefit causes catastrophic drops in installation rates and undermines renewable energy goals. Three years after Hawaiʻi cut solar credits, Ohm Analytics estimates the household solar market had shrunk by more than half, and that the time it would take to pay off a system increased from five to nine years. Ohm projects California’s household solar market will contract by 42 percent this year, though higher interest rates are also contributing to that downturn.
Wyer said that dramatic changes like those in California and Hawaiʻi are reactive, and aren’t the right way to address concerns about cost-shifting or battery adoption. “I don’t think that cutting net metering by 75%, or a very sharp decline, leads to a stable, healthy environment for the growth of electrification.”
A solar slowdown was a risk policymakers in Puerto Rico were not willing to take. The territory currently sources 97 percent of its energy from fossil fuels — and more than half of it from burning coal and oil — but it has ambitious renewable energy goals. Its legislature passed a law five years ago requiring the archipelago to reach 40 percent clean energy by 2025 and 100 percent by 2050.
Puerto Ricans also view energy resilience as a matter of survival. Solar adoption skyrocketed after Hurricane Maria in 2017, and today more than 110,000 of Puerto Rico’s 1.2 million households have solar arrays. Because of the constant risk of power outages, nearly all of them include battery storage. The archipelago is installing about 4,500 systems per month. All of that sun power is offsetting energy demand by about 600 megawatts during the day, preventing blackouts on a daily basis.
It’s unlikely that the meteoric growth would be sustained without the solar credits that make financing or leasing affordable. The average household income is $24,000. “The intention of the law is to protect consumers,” said Maritza Maymi, legislative director of the Sierra Club Puerto Rico, which petitioned for the bill.
“For us it’s very important not only to move away from fossil fuels, but also to give energy security to people, especially in times of emergencies,” added Maymi. “Energy is not only a commodity, but a right that people should have access to.”
Puerto Rico’s policy, which was set to expire as soon as this April, offers a one-for-one bill credit for every kilowatt hour that a household sends back to the grid. If a house consumes 800 kilowatt hours in a month and sends 300 kilowatt hours to the grid, for example, it is billed for 500 kilowatt hours. The new law says any study reevaluating the policy can’t begin until 2030, and that changes to the credits cannot take effect fewer than 12 months after they are decided upon.
The economic and safety stakes were high enough that proponents of extending the net metering policy earned support across all five of Puerto Rico’s political parties. The bill passed unanimously.
“We talked to members from other parties right away and found support across the aisle so that it would not be a partisan bill,” said Maymi. “We gave them social reasons and economic reasons for supporting the bill, and they saw the need to protect the program.”
As for the usual critiques of the costs of net metering, Eduardo Bhatia, a former legislator who drafted the clean energy mandate in 2019, said the benefits to promoting solar adoption outweighed those concerns. “In my eyes, it pays for itself in a dramatic reduction in old and antiquated generation in Puerto Rico, and in [the] purchase of oil and expensive fossil fuels,” Bhatia told Grist.
Bhatia added that concerns over why other consumers should subsidize solar credits don’t consider the collective benefit of transitioning to clean energy, gaining resilience against hurricanes, and taking pressure off the grid. “It has a net positive effect on the whole island of Puerto Rico.”
As for the rest of the country, Wyer said that states that want to take another look at their solar incentives might consider a middle ground between slashing credits and paying the full retail price for them. In New Hampshire, customers receive a credit equal to about 75 percent of the standard electricity rate. That’s enough to entice households to install the systems, and coupled with battery incentives, could get them to consider adding storage for more savings. “You need to find a way to incentivize the battery without killing the solar,” he said.
Correction: A quote has been corrected to eliminate an error regarding which entity procures Puerto Rico’s energy fuels.
Limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels has been the gold standard for climate action since at least the 2015 Paris Agreement. A new scientific study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change, however, suggests that the world unknowingly passed this benchmark back in 2020. This would mean that the pace of warming is a full two decades ahead of projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, and that we’ll cross the 2-degree threshold in the next few years.
Even more surprising than the findings, perhaps, is the fact that they were derived from the study of sea sponges. A research team led by Professor Malcolm McCulloch of the University Western Australia Oceans Institute analyzed sclerosponges, a primitive orange sponge species found clinging to cave roofs deep in the ocean. Sclerosponges grow extremely slowly — just a fraction of a millimeter a year — and can live for hundreds of years. This longevity is part of why they can be particularly valuable sources of climate data, given that our understanding of ocean temperatures before 1900 is very hazy.
By taking samples from these sponges, McCulloch’s team was able to calculate strontium to calcium ratios, which can be used to derive water temperature back into the 1700s. These ratios were then mapped onto existing global average water temperature data so that the team could fill the holes we have at the beginning of the industrial period, when humans began releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Given how well the information gleaned from the sponges matches ocean temperature records from recent decades, the researchers were able to support extrapolating far into the past to show that the average ocean temperature was lower than the IPCC supposes.
This discrepancy is no fault of the IPCC. Existing ocean temperature records only go back to the 1850s, when sailors would throw buckets over the sides of their ships to measure the water temperature. The reliability of these older records is compromised by a number of factors, including the lack of a standardized procedure and the faultiness of 19th-century thermometers. Even beyond these shortcomings, the readings only captured surface water temperatures, which are highly variable and easily influenced by the weather, unlike temperatures from deeper in the sea. Not only this, but that data was only gathered along the major shipping routes of the time, which means only certain parts of the Northern Hemisphere were covered for many years.
Still, until this week’s study, there have been precious few alternative means of determining the average global ocean temperature before widespread industrialization and rampant carbon pollution. This is why the IPCC takes its pre-industrial baseline from the period between 1850 and 1900, well after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Ocean temperatures gleaned from the sclerosponges used for the new study could be more reliable than documentary records for a number of reasons. For one, the sponges come from well below the surface sea layer, in what is called the ocean mixed layer, where there is a constant tumult of water and the atmosphere. Far steadier and reliable temperatures can be recorded in this part of the ocean, McCulloch told Grist. “There is no other natural variability, except what’s coming from the atmosphere,” he said.
And because the sponges were sampled in the Caribbean, where major ocean currents like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation don’t distort water temperatures, the heat differentials that they reveal can more readily be attributed to global heating patterns. “It essentially carries the ocean-warming signal very well,” McCulloch said of the study’s sample.
So why sponges? Much research has been done on coral — McCulloch himself has spent most of his career studying them — but coral doesn’t lend itself well to temperature studies. “They’re pretty complicated critters to work with, actually,” McCulloch said, “because they have a lot of biological control on how they record temperature.”
Sclerosponges, on the other hand, are simpler: They build their skeletons by pumping seawater in and out. “They seem not to fiddle too much with the composition of the calcifying fluid,” McCulloch added. Plus, they’d already demonstrated their reliability in analyses of carbon isotopes (used to track fossil-fuel burning), and are found in the mixed layer of the ocean — the best place for the temperature analysis to occur.
The study began in earnest in 2013, and the more extensive sample collection was done in 2017, when divers were sent down to chisel sponges off the undersea walls. (They don’t like to be disturbed.) These samples were cut in half, and McCulloch took his halves back to Australia in his luggage. Back in the lab, samples were taken from every 0.5-millimeter length of the sponges — the equivalent of about two years of the sponges’ lives — from the outer layer to the core. The samples were then tested for age with uranium-series dating, as well as the strontium to calcium ratios and for carbon and boron isotopes. (Boron is used to calculate pH levels.)
While the new paper was able to persuade skeptics of its findings during the peer -review stage, on its own, it’s unlikely to dislodge current consensus estimates about how much global warming has already occurred — roughly 1.2 degrees C, according to many current estimates, compared to the 1.7 degrees posited by the new study, which is the first instrumental record of the preindustrial ocean temperature.
“I would want to include more records before claiming a global temperature reconstruction,” Dr. Hali Kilbourne, a geological oceanographer at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, told the New York Times. With more research being undertaken — a team in Japan is looking into Okinawan sponges — we may have those records soon.
A new study led by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has found that MHWs are changing the communities of microorganisms that make up the foundation of the oceanic food chain, affecting entire coastal ecosystems.
“While the drivers of individual MHWs can be region-specific and complex, most extreme MHWs are linked to phases of large-scale climate modes, some of which are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change,” the study said. “Similarly, the frequency, intensity, and duration of MHWs has been increasing over the last century, linked to anthropogenic global warming, and this trend is projected to continue. In fact, by the late 21st century widespread near-permanent MHW status could be the ‘new-normal’ across large oceanic regions.”
There have recently been marine heat waves off the coast of Tasmania and Australia’s East Coast, a press release from CSIRO said.
A variety of factors can cause MHWs, and El Niño and other large climate drivers can impact their intensity, frequency and duration.
Dr. Mark Brown, lead author of the study, said the research team examined an extreme MHW off the coast of Tasmania in 2015 to 2016 and found it significantly impacted microorganisms.
“The marine heatwave transformed the microbial community in the water column to resemble those found more than 1000 km north, and supported the presence of many organisms that are uncommon at this latitude,” Brown said in the press release. “This reshaping leads to the occurrence of unusual species, the development of unique combinations of organisms, and can cause cascading effects throughout the ecosystem, including changes in the fate of carbon sequestered from the atmosphere.”
During the study, the researchers observed marine microbiota for more than 12 years.
“For instance, we observed a shift away from the normal phytoplankton species at this site towards smaller cells that are not easily consumed by larger animals, potentially leading to profound changes all the way up the food chain,” Brown said.
Dr. Levente Bodrossy, CSIRO principle research scientist, said the team simplified their method in observing tens of thousands of microbes from the ocean.
“This will enable us to evaluate the health of the marine ecosystem and predict how it will change with predicted global warming,” Bodrossy said in the press release. “We’ll be able to better predict the future of fish stocks and marine carbon sequestration in different regions of the global ocean.”
The study, “A marine heatwave drives significant shifts in pelagic microbiology,” was published in the journal Communications Biology.
“Observations like these, especially those done in the open ocean, are difficult to sustain but are crucial for understanding and forecasting the future status of the marine ecosystem,” Bodrossy said.
Firefighters in Chile are battling intense forest fires while the country mourns the 122 people who have been killed in the blazes, reported The Associated Press.
“The wind was terrible, the heat scorching. There was no respite,” said local builder Pedro Quezada, while standing in the ruins of his home in the Valparaiso region, as reported by Reuters.
The fires gained strength and momentum on Friday, reaching the tourist cities of Valparaiso and Viña del Mar.
Entire neighborhoods in Viña del Mar were destroyed, along with the vehicles of residents who sifted through the scorched remnants of their homes.
“From one moment to the next, the fire reached the botanical park. In 10 minutes the fire was already on us,” said Jesica Barrios, a resident of Viña del Mar whose home was destroyed by the fires, as The Guardian reported. “There was smoke, the sky turned black, everything was dark. The wind felt like a hurricane. It was like being in hell.”
Undersecretary of the Interior Manuel Monsalve said on Sunday night that there were 165 active fires, an increase from 154 the previous day. Areas most affected by the blazes were under a curfew of 9 p.m.
Monsalve said cloudy conditions and temperatures that were a little cooler could assist authorities in extinguishing the fires.
“It is Chile as a whole that suffers and mourns our dead,” President Gabriel Boric said, addressing the nation in a televised broadcast, as reported by Reuters. “We are facing a tragedy of very great magnitude.”
The military was called in to help firefighters as helicopters tried to put out the fires from the air.
On Sunday, Monsalve said roughly 14,000 homes had been damaged in the areas surrounding Quilpué and Viña del Mar.
“The sky was black,’’ said Regina Figueroa, a resident of a community outside Viña del Mar, as The New York Times reported. “You couldn’t see anything. Everyone was screaming, shouting instructions, wailing into the wind.”
“I couldn’t believe we were alive. But we were the lucky ones,” Figueroa said. “I lost my mother-in-law, my sister-in law.”
The wildfires were the most severe natural disaster in Chile since an earthquake in 2010 that killed 521 people.
“We are together, all of us, fighting the emergency. The priority is to save lives,” Boric said, as reported by Reuters.
Voters in Paris approved an increase in parking fees for SUVs In a referendum on February 4. Vehicles weighing over 1.6 metric tons will have hourly parking fees tripled as the city seeks to become a more bikeable and pedestrian-friendly. The passed proposal also comes ahead of the 2024 Olympics to be held in Paris.
As BBC reported, 54.55% of voters agreed to the proposal to increase parking rates for SUVs, but there was only about a 5.7% voter turnout.
The approved proposal means that parking fees for SUVs will now total 18 euros (about $19), Reuters reported. This rate applies per hour for the first two hours, then increases. Non-residents parking in central Paris could pay 225 euros (about $243) for parking for 6 hours; by comparison, cars under 1.6 metric tons pay about 6 euros per hour, totalling $75 for a 6-hour park, as reported by The Associated Press. Outside of central Paris, the rates will increase to a starting fee of €12 an hour.
With the passed referendum, the increased parking rates will take effect starting in September.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo proposed the increased parking rates, noting that these larger vehicles “threaten our health and our planet” as well as take up too much space, The Associated Press reported.
The new parking rules do offer full exemptions, including for people with disabilities, taxis, healthcare workers and tradespeople. EVs have some exemptions; fully electric vehicles under 2 metric tons are exempt from the increased parking rates, according to Le Monde.
According to David Belliard, deputy mayor of transport in Paris, the increased parking rates will impact about 10% of vehicles in the city. The fees could bring up to €35 million per year for Paris, Le Monde reported.
Automotive groups, including 40 Millions d’Automobilistes and Mobilite Club France, have protested the SUV parking rates, arguing that these increases will negatively impact families and that newer SUVs are not any more polluting than older, smaller vehicles.
The passed referendum follows a proposal to ban e-scooters in the city that voters passed last year. Mayor Hidalgo noted the high rates of accidents with e-scooters and the failure to dock them properly, leaving them blocking pathways throughout Paris.
The measures are part of larger goals for Paris to become a more environmentally friendly city. In December, the city reported plans to convert a busy roundabout into an urban forest, and last summer, officials announced the final phase of a Seine restoration project that would make the famous river swimmable again for the first time in a century. The city’s Plan Velo: Act 2 further plans to make Paris entirely cyclable by 2026.
The increased SUV parking rate could influence other cities to follow suit; The Connexion reported that Mayor Grégory Doucet of Lyon, France would implement a tiered parking fee structure, which is expected to take effect before summer 2024.
