Publications

In the letter, the ten leading environmental organisations in Europe express their grave concerns over the direction the EU seems to be taking with the new Commission. The structure of the new Commission, the mission letters, and the choice of Commissioners all reveal a seri…

In Bankwatch Mail 60 we take a look at how the new Member States spending plans for EU funds are shaping up. Besides some signs of hope, we find still a notable lack of long-term sustainable strategies of central and eastern European countries. And while former British prime…

EU member states and the European Commission, after what has felt like a marathon two-year process, are now engaged in finalising agreements on the EU’s Structural and Cohesion Funds (ESIF) investment strategies and spending plans for the 2014 -2020 EU budget period. Where t…

The European Investment Bank, the biggest multilateral public bank in the world by lending volume and the self-styled ‘EU bank’, has recently announced that it will be reviewing its approach to climate change in the coming months. According to comments made by EIB vice-presi…

Mathieu Fichter, Team Leader on ‘Sustainable Growth’ in the European Commission’s Regional and Urban Policy directorate (DG Regio), and Markus Trilling, EU Funds coordinator for Bankwatch and Friends of the Earth Europe, discuss and reflect on the challenges and opportunitie…

Bankwatch’s Czech co-ordinator Ondřej Pašek takes time out from EU funds programming documentation digging to describe just one little alarming discovery.

Whether at the global level with the United Nations Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production, the European level with the Environment Action Programme to 2020, or at the national level, a great deal of effort is being made to promote, develop and exp…

The Czech government’s plan to phase out part of its lignite-fired power plant fleet by 2025 has hit the news recently with total annual power output from this climate-damaging source set to drop from 40 TWh in 2015 to 18 TWh by 2035. However the increased electricity consum…

Some Czech projects proposed for EU funding are already sticking out as ‘white elephant’ investments. As the final spending decisions for 2014-2020 shape up, Bankwatch will be keeping a close eye on the likely stampede of similar project concepts all across central and easte…

As Latvia’s authorities look to finalise EU funds allocations for the 2014-2020 period, the nation’s energy supply – where it is sourced from and how it is being used – remains the elephant in the room. As in every economy, energy is a crucial sector, with significant influe…

The hiring of former British prime minister Tony Blair to advise a BP-led consortium pushing forward with plans to pump Caspian gas from Azerbaijan to Europe has bumped the ‘Euro-Caspian Mega Pipeline’ (ECMP) into western media coverage and lead to criticism of yet another u…

EU funds for the 2014-2020 budgetary period look set to further fuel the massive over-exploitation of biomass for energy use in Slovakia. Formally, both the European Commission and the Slovak Ministry of Economy have announced the introduction of sustainability rules to gove…