- by Eliza Amouret
MARSEILLE, France — From her bedroom window, Chantal Rouet sees their giant silhouettes, smells their smoke and hears their engines roar. The little house she bought in L’Estaque, a district of Marseille that resembles a small Provence village, sits just 500 meters (less than half a mile) from the port where cruise ships await passengers and undergo repairs, at the largest shipyard on the Mediterranean. “If I had known, I’m not sure I would have chosen this place to live,” says Chantal, who now dreams of moving to the countryside.
While confined to her home during the pandemic, she started wondering whether the cruise ships docked down the road were impacting her health. For the first time, she was breathing their fumes every day around the clock. “During lockdown, seventeen cruise ships were docked in Marseille,” she says. “There was no other pollution. Car and air traffic were reduced.” The whole world stopped, but the cruises kept their auxiliary motors on and generators to produce electricity onboard. Unable to cruise or welcome passengers, the crew from outside Marseille had to quarantine onboard.
Jean-Pierre Lapébie, who lives on the hill of Mourepiane, a stone’s throw from Chantal, has a breathtaking view of the docks in Marseille where the ships pull in and out. “We started to notice that a lot of us in the neighborhood were developing health problems,” he says, enumerating the respiratory and cardiovascular issues that arose among his neighbors. “We thought, ‘There’s a problem,’” he adds. While Rouet created Breathing Kills, Lapébie serves as president of Cap au Nord, two groups that fight for the residents of the northern neighborhood of Marseille.
With 2.4 million passengers in 2024 — and 2,000 people locally employed, according to 2017 figures on the lobby Cruise Marseille Provence’s webpage — Marseille is the leading French port for cruises. From April to November every year, cruise ships constantly come and go, leaving behind noxious fumes that invade the northern neighborhoods and pollute the sea. These fumes are full of sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxide and fine particles that, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), can cause respiratory and cardiovascular problems.
“Air pollution is dangerous for human health in general,” says Alexandre Armengaud, head of scientific and international cooperation at Atmosud, the air quality observatory for southern France. According to the WHO, air pollution is responsible for 6.7 million deaths around the world each year. “This pollution is multisource,” says Armengaud. It comes from maritime traffic but also other means of transportation, industrial pollution and wood burning.
Elliot Chevet, a physicist with expertise in fluid dynamics, spent three years researching the emissions generated by maritime traffic in Marseille. “Around the port, in L’Estaque and Mourepiane, boats release 47 percent of the nitrogen dioxide and fine particle emissions,” says Chevet.
The association Cap au Nord has installed microcaptors to measure the fine particles in the air. Scattered throughout the neighborhoods around the port, these little boxes measure the concentration of air pollution and report it in real time. “During the lockdown, the sensors were in use. We noticed that the levels of pollution were very significant,” says Lapébie. “We are three times above WHO standards,” said Marie Prost Coletta, member of Cap au Nord, to local media in 2023.
In response to residents’ concerns, Atmosud is installing more precise captors on the hill of Mourepiane. Inhabitants can check a website to monitor recent levels. Mourepiane is slightly uphill, directly above the cruise ships’ chimneys, says Alexandre Armengaud. “But pollution is extremely volatile,” he points out. In fact, the plumes of smoke are influenced by the winds — they can drift to the coast or get pushed out to sea.
However, for these citizens who see these giant ships every day, things are not moving fast enough. “We want the same norms as in the Baltic Sea,” says Lapébie, referring to the Sulphur Emission Control Area (SECA) created in the Baltic, the Channel and the Northern Sea in 2021. In such areas, boats now have to use fuel with a sulphur level five times lower — from 0.5 to 0.1 percent. According to a scientific study published in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and led by Lars Barregard, this measure has brought “an estimated reduction in premature deaths attributable to maritime traffic of about 35 percent.”
In the Mediterranean Sea, a SECA was implemented on May 1, 2025. But for some organizations, this step forward is still not enough. For Guillaume Picard, a former ferry captain who is now fighting the cruises in the French Riviera through another association called Stop Croisière (Stop Cruise Ships), “cruising is an activity we could live without.”
Picard joined Stop Croisière for environmental reasons. Together with associations from Barcelona, Venice and Amsterdam, Stop Croisière forms the European Cruise Activist Network, a network of organizations standing up to the cruise industry and labelling it as a threat to the environment and human wellbeing. Together, they established the first Saturday in June as World Anti-Cruise Day, coordinating actions in each city. Last September, activists from Stop Croisière prevented a cruise ship from entering Marseille’s harbour by blocking it with their kayaks.
The group also hopes to follow in the footsteps of Venice, which introduced a ban in 2021 for larger cruises leading to an 80 percent decrease in sulfur oxide levels in the city, according to Transport and Environment, a European lobby promoting more sustainable transport.
Yet, for Jane da Mosto, member of We are Here Venice, a nonprofit committed to keeping Venice alive and livable for its residents, this measure is “a lot less impactful than everyone had hoped. It was supposed to accelerate the disappearance of large cruises from the lagoon,” she says. However, “the Port Authority and the Cruise Terminal company are investing 100 to 200 million euros (between 116 and 233 million U.S. dollars) in additional infrastructure for alternative cruise docks in the lagoon,” she adds. “These funds could have been invested in a genuine ecological transition instead.”
In March 2023, Cap au Nord, alongside locals and another association, Alternatiba, filed a complaint that cruise ships emissions were damaging to human health and the natural habitat in the northern neighborhoods of Marseille. However, little came from their complaints, aside from some general promises from the port and metropolitan authorities about reducing pollution.
As a matter of fact, the Port Authority is investing in electrifying the docks by 2028 to abate carbon dioxide emissions, which is expected to positively impact air quality. Yet, organizations like Cap au Nord and Stop Croisière think it might not be enough, as ships will continue releasing fine particles and other pollutants while maneuvering in the port.
At least, “we succeeded in mobilizing the consciousness of the authorities on the topic,” Lapébie says. With the complaint, he added, “we wanted to show that citizens can take action against those entities that decide to poison the lives of others.”
Top image: The view from Chantal Rouet's bedroom window (Eliza Amouret).
Editor’s Note: This story is part of the series “Beauties Under Siege,” which offers a preview of the magazine we have in mind. It was produced as part of the first edition of the Magmatic School of Environmental Journalism.
