Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic
\n Mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi pledges to \u201cnot to let overtourism suffocate\u201d Nice with a ban on large cruise ships.
\n ADVERTISEMENTWhen Mayor Christian Estrosi addressed a crowd of supporters for Nice\u2019s traditional New Year\u2019s ceremony this week, nobody was prepared for the bombshell he would drop.”Cruises that pollute, that dump their low-cost clientele who consume nothing but leave their waste behind, have no place here,” he announced. “We prevented concrete from suffocating Nice, it is not to let overtourism suffocate it in turn.””I don’t want floating hotels to drop anchor in front of Nice,\u201d he added.In a statement sent to Euronews Travel, Christian Estrosi\u2019s office told us,\u201cWe have decided, based on the contracts signed in 2025, to ban these large units and allow only those that do not exceed 190 meters in length and a capacity of 900 passengers.\u201dBut not all cruise ships will be hit by the new rules. The mayor advised he will specifically stop ships longer than 190m and those with a capacity for more than 900 passengers from docking in the ports.”I want us to act so that we are rid of cruise ships from July 1, 2025, without having to wait until January 1, 2026,” Estrosi told Nice Press. “We are working to cancel all cruises that can still be cancelled and we will draft a banning order.\u201dMayor Estrosi claims that such an order would reduce the number of arriving cruise passengers by 70 per cent.\u00a0\u201cVenice has regained its beauty and its landscape by having a mayor who definitively refuses cruises. We intend to go in this direction, too,\u201d he said to local press.Why does Nice want to ban cruise ships?Like residents of many European ports, people in Nice have had enough of the growing cruise industry.\u00a0Europe is one of the largest cruise markets in the world, with Eurostat figures showing a record 16.4 million cruise passengers passing through EU ports in 2023, five million more than a decade ago.Cruise ships are growing too. Celebrity Cruises bring their Apex Edge-class cruise ship to Villefranche-sur-Mer, the port immediately to the east of the city of Nice. It\u2019s a 306-metre-long behemoth, depositing over 3,400 people (and likely some of the 1,300+ crew) into the small town, which has a population of 5,012.Even Estrosi admits that tourism is essential to Nice. Tourism office figures suggest it\u2019s in the region of 40 per cent of the revenue of Nice C\u00f4te d’Azur Metropolis. But cruise passengers may not spend as much with local businesses as you might think, partly because they have already paid for their food and drink onboard.\u00a0A study from Bergen, Norway – a popular stop for fjord tours – found that up to 40 per cent of people never left the ship. For those who did go ashore, their average spend was less than \u20ac23.The cruise industry argues that a passenger’s average contribution to the local economy is much higher than the Bergen estimate at around $100 (\u20ac91) a day.\u00a0ADVERTISEMENTWhile there may be an economic benefit to this sudden influx of people, it can be overwhelming for small towns and cities. But although overtourism was cited by Estrosi as his main motivation, his office clarified that the environmental impact was also a significant concern.\u201cToday, we have units that are essentially floating cities with over 5,000 passengers, keeping their engines running, emitting sulfur and other pollutants into the atmosphere, creating no jobs, and contributing to overtourism,\u201d added Christian Estrosi\u2019s office. \u201cThese units in no way align with the model we wish to develop in terms of tourism, hospitality, and respect for the local population.\u201dCruise ships are incredibly polluting. Even the most efficient modern cruise ships emit around 250g of CO2 per passenger kilometre, ten times more than a passenger plane.But it\u2019s not just CO2 that pumps out of the funnels. Sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and \u2018black carbon\u2019 or soot is belched into the sky, damaging air quality and contributing to acid rain. Some LNG-powered vessels also release methane.ADVERTISEMENTThese floating cities release huge amounts of wastewater, leech toxic heavy metals into the ocean and endanger fragile wildlife, ocean mammals and habitats.Several European towns and cities have already banned cruise ships from their ports. Venice, in 2021, banned ships from docking in its historic centre. Mallorca has limited the number of ships that can dock at once, and Barcelona has closed its north terminal to cruise ships.Will locals in Nice be supportive of Estrosi\u2019s wish?Many locals have long been campaigning for an end to cruise ships in Nice and other parts of the region so they welcome Estrosi\u2019s plansJuliette Chesnel-Leroux, leader of the green opposition in Nice speaking to France 3, hailed the move as “a historic victory for ecology \u2026 obtained after a long fight.\u201d She added that it demonstrates that \u201crepeated warnings about the disastrous consequences of these giants of the seas have finally been heard.”\u00a0ADVERTISEMENTEuropean ports have played host to a number of anti-cruise protests over the last year, many of which involved the group \u2018Stop Crosi\u00e8re,\u2019 or \u2018Stop Cruises.\u2019. Based in the Marseille region, they are actively campaigning to ban cruises. A statement on their website reads:\u201cOn an environmental level as on a human level, nothing justifies the maintenance of these absurd, energy-intensive and toxic floating cities.\u201dSpeaking on the ici Province radio station, a local Radio France outlet, co-founder and spokesperson for the Stop Croisiere collective Guillaume Piccard welcomed the prospect of a ban, but raised concerns with the details.\u201cWhat is a bit regrettable in the statement of Mr. Estrosi is that he wants to sort between luxury cruises and mass cruises,\u201d said Piccard (translated). \u201cHe wants the small cruise ships to still come into the port of Nice, just that their passengers don\u2019t drop rubbish on the ground.\u201dADVERTISEMENTJacky Bonnemains, director of the NGO Robin des Bois, also takes Estrosi\u2019s comments with a pinch of salt. \u201cThe declarations made by Mr. Estrosi, Mayor of Nice, are a bit of a flash in the pan,\u201d he told Euronews Travel. \u201cIt\u2019s a political show before the United Nations Ocean Conference.\u201dCan the Nice mayor ban cruise ships?According to BFMTV, Christian Estrosi and the town hall have little to no power to ban cruise ships. The decision will rest on the shoulders of the port and the chamber of commerce.\u00a0However, Estrosi does have some influence. In the past, he has held various ministerial positions in the French government, serving under both Sarkozy and Chirac. He is also a former president of the Regional Council of Provence-Alpes-C\u00f4te d’Azur, which owns the ports in Nice.Experts have also questioned the deadline of 1 July as being rather optimistic to be able to implement a ban. Jacky Bonnemains points out that reservations have already been made for 124 cruises to dock in Nice, up from 117 in 2024 and 97 in 2023.ADVERTISEMENT\u201cThese 2025 mega-ship calls are planned by MSC and Costa Croisi\u00e8res,\u201d says Bonnemains. \u201cThey will anchor in the bay of Villefranche-sur-Mer bordering Nice, where passengers will embark and disembark by shuttle.\u201d Parking offshore and shuttling passengers in would not be stopped under Mr Estrosi\u2019s proposed ban.The Robin des Bois chief also criticises the language used by the mayor, noting that he talked about low-cost passengers and litter, but failed to mention air pollution. \u201cIt’s more a class opposition between the poor and the rich,\u201d says Boonemains, \u201cthan a critique of the various nuisances of mass cruising.\u201dThe efforts of the mayor to ban cruise ships came less than two weeks after it was announced Nice had been picked to host the United Nations Ocean Conference in June.While the sentiment behind Estrosi\u2019s announcement is well-received by the environmental lobby, the impact will be dwarfed by the impact of heightened aviation activity in the region.ADVERTISEMENTNice C\u00f4te d’Azur Airport undertook a major expansion in 2024, with works ongoing throughout this year. By 2026, it will have increased its capacity from the current level of 14 million passengers per year to a new high of 18 million passengers.The expansion has been backed by a \u20ac100 million loan from the European Investment Bank and has received plenty of vocal support from Mayor Christian Estrosi.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi pledges to \u201cnot to let overtourism suffocate\u201d Nice with a ban on large cruise ships. ADVERTISEMENTWhen Mayor Christian Estrosi addressed a crowd of supporters for Nice\u2019s traditional New Year\u2019s ceremony this week, nobody was prepared for the bombshell he<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":177581,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-177580","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-travel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177582,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177580\/revisions\/177582"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}