Energy coordinator
Email: ioana.ciuta AT bankwatch.orgTel.: +4031 438 2489
Ioana joined Bankwatch in 2014 as coordinator of the Balkans Beyond Coal campaign, preventing new coal capacities from being built in the Western Balkans region.
She works closely with member groups and partners from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia, offering support to the national campaigns, while also advocating for stricter environmental regional policies.
Prior to joining Bankwatch, she covered nuclear energy development in Romania and Bulgaria, and followed the international climate change negotiations. She has a degree in journalism, but has been an environmental campaigner much longer than a journalist.
More from Ioana Ciută
Serbia: key national plan risks cementing coal dependence
June 29, 2021 | Read more
The Serbian government’s 15-year national Spatial Plan is so keen to stick to business-as-usual it is openly ignoring some of the country’s most pressing issues to justify plans for six new fossil fuel-based power plants. Belgrade also doesn’t appear to care much about what Serbia’s neighbour to the east thinks regarding the implications these disastrous plans would have for them.
Upgrades to the coal power plants in the Western Balkans that would bring down sulphur dioxide emissions are rare. But even where investments have been made, they have so far failed to deliver the much-needed results.
There are few things one can be sure of in life, but the constant anxiety communities near Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Tuzla power plant experience is one of them.
The energy projects proposed by the Energy Community countries for priority status, including privileged access to public funds, have now passed the evaluation stage, expecting a final decision by the year’s end. On the bright side, at least two megalomaniac projects were dropped. On the dark one, the remaining projects floor the gas pedal.
Grasping what a 600% breach of allowed SO2 emissions means is not an easy job, but our data visualisation does just that. In addition to choking the communities where coal power plants are located, SO2 pollution from the Western Balkans often reaches as far as Russia and the Black Sea Coast to the east and Germany to the West!
