Date: Thursday, 13 July 2023
The EU’s €672.5 billion Recovery and Resilience Facility fund aimed at recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic provides significant financing opportunities for renewable energy projects.
At the same time, recent efforts to speed up the implementation of renewable energy have led to revisions to the EU’s renewable energy policy, resulting in derogations from the EU’s well established environmental legislation designed to protect Europe’s stunning biodiversity.
Taken together, these bring high risks in terms of increased financing for biodiversity-damaging projects without properly assessing the environmental impact.
It is this complexity of ensuring both a crucially needed rapid renewables ramp-up and sufficiently protecting biodiversity as part of the EU’s recovery that calls for greater discussion on this area.
This webinar therefore aimed to discuss how the recent changes to the EU’s renewable energy policy, coupled with the vast funds now available through the EU’s recovery funds, can still ensure the development of renewables are in line with nature conservation objectives.
The webinar specifically explored the following topics:
- Why do we need to plan renewables in line with nature conservation goals and what are the implications for not doing so?
- How can we balance the needs of the energy sector while maintaining environmental safeguards?
- What are the alternative policy options and have they been properly assessed?
Agenda:
- Why we need renewables that work for nature?
- EU renewables’ policy revision, is it justified?
- How the changes at EU level played out nationally and recommendations. Romanian hydropower case study
- Exploring alternative policy options
Materials
