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Different shades of green: a reflection on ecology and anti-road movements under climate change through the case of the 2024 Swiss referendum on motorway expansion
Summary
This isn't a health study, but it touches on why roads matter to our wellbeing: new highways bring air pollution, microplastic pollution, and noise pollution that can affect the health of nearby communities and ecosystems. Looking at Switzerland's 2024 vote on highway expansion, researchers found that campaigners actually downplayed these environmental and health concerns, focusing instead on practical arguments about traffic and mobility — suggesting that public debates about road-building often don't fully address the health costs of pollution that come with them.
Increasingly, the concreting of landscapes including the building of new roads is perceived as contradictory with the fight against climate change initiated in many countries. Ecologist movements criticize and oppose road construction projects by highlighting the multiple negative impacts of the road infrastructure and automobility on the environment including air pollution, microplastic pollution, noise pollution, land degradation and the loss of biodiversity. In Southwestern France, the ongoing ecologist fight against the A69 Motorway project has led to intense discussions around the importance of preserving local lands and ecosystems. This highly mediatised case has brought to the fore road-related environmental issues and tensions between climate protection and mobility issues. In Switzerland, the 2024 referendum on motorway expansion offers a unique occasion to examine how road construction can be discussed and questioned at the national level. While different types of arguments were debated, this paper focusses on ecological arguments and the way they were mobilised or silenced. Interviews with members of the referendum committee have enabled to understand that climate-related arguments were deliberately set aside in favour of more technical mobility arguments. By discussing such topics, this brief research report leads to a discussion on the appropriation of multiple understandings of ecology by diverse political organizations and on the potential impacts of ecologist arguments in the fight towards more just mobility futures. Ultimately, the paper argues for a greater recognition and an exploration of the intersections between climate justice and mobility justice.