Local elections on March 15 will usher in a new era in Paris, after 12 years under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who has overseen dramatic changes in the city.
Hidalgo was elected in 2014 and saw her mandate renewed in 2020, helming a left-wing coalition that included the Socialist Party and the Greens. She decided not to seek a third term this year. But the environmental policies that she championed have left a visible mark on the French capital and are likely to endure regardless of who succeeds her.
Local elections on March 15 will usher in a new era in Paris, after 12 years under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who has overseen dramatic changes in the city.
Hidalgo was elected in 2014 and saw her mandate renewed in 2020, helming a left-wing coalition that included the Socialist Party and the Greens. She decided not to seek a third term this year. But the environmental policies that she championed have left a visible mark on the French capital and are likely to endure regardless of who succeeds her.
The green transition underway in Paris, Europe’s most densely populated region, matters well beyond its boundaries. Urban areas account for almost half of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, and experts have pointed to Paris’s policies as an example for other capitals around the world. It has been “at the forefront” of Western cities’ efforts to confront rising temperatures, said Melissa Checker, a professor of urban studies at the City University of New York.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo greets a protester during a climate march in Paris on March 12, 2022.Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images
Under Hidalgo’s watch, Paris expanded bike lanes to cover over 1,000 miles. Paired with a growing public bike-sharing fleet, this contributed to a 240 percent rise in cycling between 2018 and 2023.
The administration also closed a central area of the city to most car traffic, and hundreds more streets have been or are being pedestrianized. Joggers, cyclists, and bar terraces have taken over the banks of the Seine, which were major roads until about a decade ago. Stretches of the river have been cleaned up for public swimming, and some 100,000 people took a dip last summer.
To tackle extreme heat, the city government has developed green areas across Paris. Checker pointed to the creation of pop-up beaches along the Seine and shady areas as particularly innovative. According to Christophe Najdovski, a city councilor in charge of revegetation, some 150,000 trees have been planted and 370 streets greened since 2020, with several so-called urban forests now growing in the capital—one of them in front of City Hall.
“Since her election in 2014, Anne Hidalgo has shown a very strong political will to transform the city and adapt it to the major challenges of the 21st century, particularly the consequences of global warming,” Najdovski said. “We want to go beyond enclosed gardens and have nature overflow and irrigate the whole city.”
The urban forest on the forecourt of the city hall in Paris on July 23, 2025.Riccardo Milani/AFP via Getty Images
All these steps, alongside efforts to boost the city’s reliance on renewables and a push to make buildings more energy efficient by providing financial help out of the city coffers, helped reduce Paris’s carbon footprint by 21 percent between 2014 and 2022, and cut pollution by 40 percent, according to Airparif, an air quality monitor.
But not everyone is happy with Paris’s environmental push. The new pedestrian zones have resulted in some 15,000 fewer parking places since 2017—a 11.5 percent drop. Basile Tissot, a French lawyer who defends motorists’ interests, said Hidalgo’s “car-phobic” policies, including banning vehicles from many areas and lowering speed limits, have massively worsened congestion in certain neighborhoods.
Independent contractors “often refuse to take on jobs in Paris to avoid traffic jams,” Tissot said. Despite a decline in the overall volume of traffic, Paris currently ranks as one of the most congested cities in the world.
Critics stress that the burden of Hidalgo’s policies is unfairly distributed. Those who reside in the swanky city center are hardly affected, as they barely need cars to get around; plus, they are allowed to drive in the restricted traffic zone. It’s the people who live in the suburbs and work in Paris—and thus have to rely more on driving—who bear the brunt of the policy changes. “The inequity of these measures from a social standpoint is flagrant,” Tissot said.
A road sign indicates the limited traffic zone in central Paris on April 5, 2025.Thomas Samson/AFP via Getty Images
Supporters of the green transition counter that public transport has also significantly improved. Najdovski noted the extension of a metro line that, since 2024, stretches from the northern suburb of Saint Denis to Orly airport in the south; longer running hours on weekends; a more robust bus network; and the planned opening of four new metro lines just outside the city between 2026 and 2031. (Public transport is largely managed by regional authorities, although the City Hall plays a role, too.)
Pursuing climate action and social fairness at the same time can be a difficult balancing act, especially in a country where a fuel tax hike sparked months of violent protests in 2018 and 2019. “There’s a twin crisis going on, climate change and economic polarization, and we need to be fixing both at the same time,” Checker said. “If we’re going to take climate change seriously it’s going to involve sacrifice, and all of that sacrifice shouldn’t have to fall onto the shoulders of people with lower incomes.”
Though the French capital’s transformation has drawn much attention in recent years, it is part of a wider trend. Air quality remains poor in cities across much of the global south, but in the developed world it is improving. In Europe in particular, “things are moving in the right direction,” Checker said, “although no one is moving fast enough.”
London expanded its Ultra Low Emission Zone to all boroughs in 2023, and within a year, pollution was 27 percent lower than it would have been otherwise. In Copenhagen, carbon dioxide emissions were down by almost 73 percent in 2021 compared to 2005. Milan has built long stretches of bike lanes in its city center, Barcelona is creating new public squares and pedestrianized green zones, and Amsterdam is making efforts to curb mass tourism, which is associated with excessive waste, degradation of public spaces, and high carbon emissions from air travel.
Cities around the world are also doing a better job at coordinating their environmental efforts. C40, an independent network of mayors from 97 cities which, together, account for almost a billion people and one-quarter of the global economy, provides members with guidance, peer support, research, and resources to maximize the impact of their green policies. Around three-quarters of its member cities are currently seeing a decline in emissions, according to C40.
Paris’s green transition didn’t start with Hidalgo, though she did shift it into a higher gear. According to Sabine Bognon, a lecturer at the Paris School of Urban Planning, the first real push toward sustainability came under Bertrand Delanoë, who served as mayor from 2001 to 2014. For example, the extension of metro running hours on weekends and the closing of the Seine’s southern bank to traffic happened during Delanoë’s tenure.
Despite fierce resistance that Hidalgo received from the right-wing opposition in recent years, this month’s mayoral election is unlikely to jeopardize the transformation that she brought about. Half a dozen candidates are vying to replace her: Emmanuel Grégoire, a former deputy mayor in the outgoing administration, promises to keep the green transition going and is leading in the polls. His main challenger is conservative Rachida Dati. She has long criticized Hidalgo’s approach, arguing, for example, that making central high streets unreachable by car would hurt businesses—before being proved wrong.
But now, with a majority of Parisians backing the pro-environment efforts, even Dati seems little inclined to make any radical changes. While she still lambasts “punitive” environmentalism and wants to suppress the limited traffic zone in central Paris, she also pledges to further develop bike lanes and continue revegetation, including on the iconic Place de la République. Far-right candidates have taken a more revisionist approach, but their chances of winning the mayoral race are virtually nonexistent.
“A 21st century city cannot look like a 20th century one, we need a software update,” Najdovski said. In the French capital, “Ecology has won the culture battle.”
