Publications

Romania is the country in the South East European and Central East European with the best enabling conditions for the energy transition. Yet it continues to be one of the lignite intensive countries in the EU. Read our report to explore why on the European scale, Romanians s…

National Energy and Climate Plan is a fundamental document that will define Romania’s ambitions in the field for the next decade. The recently published NECP is unambitious and it ignores Romania’s enormous potential for green economy transition and the European Green Deal.

The EIB had already proclaimed itself the EU’s climate bank long before the vdLeyen EU Commission presented the idea of transforming a part of the Bank into Europe’s Climate Bank. It has been over a decade now since the EIB committed at least 25% of its finance to support th…

As coal phase-out is well underway in the European Union, and the international community is mobilizing to tackle the climate crisis, new coal plants are still planned and built in Southeast Europe, courtesy of Chinese financial support.

In 2018, pollution control legislation under the Energy Community Treaty finally obliged the Western Balkan countries to start reducing the choking air pollution from their coal power plants. Action was badly needed. In 2016, these 16 plants emitted as much sulphur dioxide a…

This document aims to provide information to Members of the European Parliament about the size, scope and lack of sufficient transparency at the export credit agencies (ECAs). The paper proposes changes to make the ECAs climate- friendly institutions, based on human rights a…

The production of ICT has a huge impact on the environment, climate change, human rights and working conditions along global supply chains in the Global South. This document aims to provide information to Members of the European Parliament about sustainability and human righ…

At a time when public calls for tackling the causes of the climate crisis are growing, Romania’s gas industry has been expanding, courtesy of the Parliament and international financial institutions. This report, by Bankwatch Romania, finds that much of the burgeoning gas dev…

Bankwatch and over 70 other civil society groups have written to President of the European Investment Bank Werner Hoyer, members of the bank’s board of directors as well as the incoming President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, and its Executive Vice Preside…

Smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices have become omnipresent in our society. With an expected annual growth of 9.6 % between 2017 and 2022, Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) is one of the fastest growing industries. While everybody knows ICT brands…

In the last decade, a wave of hydropower construction in the Western Balkans has caused ever-increasing public outcry. Large hydropower projects have long caused public resistance, but the mushrooming of smaller plants of less than 10 megawatts (MW) in remote and often ecolo…

The aim of this study is to describe the process by which local communities participated in the Transformation Action Plan of Coal Region Upper Nitra and to propose concrete steps towards the better integration of the local communities in order to achieve the Action Plan’s g…