December 18, 2018 | Read more In the middle of last week, negotiators in this year’s UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland, were scrambling to agree on guidelines for the Paris Agreement that would ensure global warming is capped at no more than 2 degrees. At the same time, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), one of the world’s key development banks, adopted a new energy lending strategy that ends its support for coal but keeps the door wide open for gas. Ioana Ciuta of CEE Bankwatch Network takes a closer look.
December 13, 2018 | Read more Europe’s commitment to the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development means that the EU must drive an energy transformation, but in Romania, inadequate financial support and a lack of political will still stand in the way of progress.
December 12, 2018 | Read more Renewable energy has gotten a bad rap in Latvia. Since the construction of hydroelectric power stations during the Soviet era to the recent installment of the first wind parks and the country’s feed-in tarrif system, the ‘mandatory procurement scheme,’ renewables have been used for nefarious purposes like fuelling populism during election campaigns.
December 12, 2018 | Read more A Government Decision granting RON 2 775 722 (EUR 596 000) to Oltenia Energy Complex to expropriate the land needed for the planned Craiova Power Plant ash storage expansion has been put into public debate by the Ministry of Energy.
December 11, 2018 | Read more Brussels, Katowice, Prague – While confirming its plans to align with the Paris Agreement, the European Investment Bank (EIB) still continues to fund climate damaging fossil fuel projects, having disbursed more than EUR 11.8 billion in fossil fuels projects since 2013 – point out NGOs in a new briefing [1].
December 11, 2018 | Read more There is a sad joke in Slovakia that the country could become a museum for renewable energy sources (RES). Not because the Slovak physicist Aurel Stodola invented in 1928 the world’s oldest heat pump that still powers Geneva’s city hall, but because of its antiquated energy policy that lacks systematic support for renewables at the local and national levels.
December 11, 2018 | Read more As new mines mushroom in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén (BAZ) county, Hungary, air pollution picks up the pace, our independent air monitoring shows. Authorities need to help people move towards cleaner heating systems and put an end to coal mining in the region.
December 10, 2018 | Read more Today 10 December marks the seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To coincide with this milestone, Bankwatch together with more than 200 organisations globally has called on international financiers [1] to ensure that these institutions support the realisation of human rights, avoid causing or contributing to rights abuses, promote an enabling environment for public participation, and safeguard rights defenders.
December 10, 2018 | Read more Environmental NGO Eko-svest has this week called on the Macedonian government not to continue subsidising new renewable energy plants through the guaranteed buy-off of electricity at a guaranteed price and to instead move to a more competitive system with lower costs for end consumers.
December 6, 2018 | Read more The European Parliament urged the EBRD and EIB to review their support for hydropower plant projects in its last week’s resolutions on the European Commission’s 2018 reports on Albania and Montenegro. The votes come as a clear sign that the European institutions are starting to reconsider their support for hydropower as green energy.
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