French President Emmanuel Macron announced Monday that he intends to call a public referendum to make combating climate change and protecting the environment a constitutional clause, in an initiative that is likely to not come to light due to the opposition of the right-wing that controls Parliament.

Addressing the Citizens' Conference for Climate, Macron said that this constitutional reform project must first approve both houses of parliament, which seems unlikely to happen due to the right's control of the Senate.

The Citizens' Climate Conference is a committee set up by the government of 150 citizens chosen by lot to provide it with proposals on measures that can be taken to combat global warming.

One of these proposals provides for the "inclusion of the concepts of biological diversity, the environment and combating global warming" in Article 1 of the Constitution.

If Macron's initiative goes ahead, it will be the first public referendum organized in France since 2005, when French voters voted against the adoption of a unified European constitution.

The right-wing opposition was quick to criticize Macron's initiative.

"This will not change anything: the environmental charter essentially has a constitutional value," said Bruno Rettaio, head of the Republican bloc in the Senate, accusing the president of the republic of hiding behind this initiative in order to "hide his poor environmental record."

The environmental charter approved in 2004 has been included since the first of March 2005 in the first preambular paragraph of the constitution.