Ukraine Reconstruction Campaigner
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Anna is Bankwatch’s Ukraine Reconstruction Campaigner, working on green reconstruction and environmental safeguards in Ukraine’s recovery. Her work focuses on alternative sources of energy for communities, energy resilience, and the alignment of Ukraine’s energy policy and public investment management system with EU standards. Originally from Kyiv, she holds an MSc in Environmental Sciences and Policy from Central European University and is based in Bratislava.
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A quick visit to the Kolubara mining basin reveals that the resettlement there looks nothing like the presentation from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
A roundtable discussion on European public banks and energy lending brought together Members of the European Parliament and non-governmental organisations, while the public banks themselves chose to stay away.
Comments on the draft EBRD Transport Strategy
May 30, 2013 | Read more
The explicit recognition of the Avoid-Shift-Improve framework in the EBRD’s draft transport strategy is welcome and serves as a useful guiding principle on where investments should be concentrated. However, how this principle is applied in practice is not explained throughout the document and the bank’s planned activities need to be more clearly linked to this framework in the document.
Experience with the implementation of the Environmental and Social Policy in the case of several controversial projects suggests that the EBRD’s environmental and social safeguards are not robust enough and need strengthened. The case of the Kolubara coal mine ‘Environmental Improvement’ project, Serbia illustrates how the policy places most responsibilities on the client, and EBRD assessment and monitoring are excessively reliant on input from the client, even in cases when feedback from NGOs and communities consistently contradicts the claims of the project sponsor.
Today we’re relieved in Zagreb as one energy project that could have had a destructive impact on Croatia’s future has lost its financing and thus its chances of going ahead are drastically reduced: I’m speaking about the infamous Ombla dam, a project for an underground hydropower plant that would have practically destroyed a protected area close to Dubrovnik.
