In a letter to the Slovenian government, the company’s lawyers described the government’s actions as “arbitrary and unreasonable”. Environmentalists said it was the company whose behaviour was “outrageous”.

Friends of the Earth Slovenia accused Ascent of endangering the country’s drinking water supply and urged the new Slovenian government not to bow to pressure.

Paul de Clerck, economic justice coordinator for Friends of the Earth Europe, said: “It’s a scandal that, amid a climate and environmental emergency, a country like Slovenia can be sued for doing the right thing, protecting its water and environment from destructive fracking.”

London-based Ascent Resources is taking legal action using the UK-Slovenia bilateral investment treaty and the controversial multilateral Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), which the UK and Slovenia have both signed up to.

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The ECT has previously been used by a German energy company to fight the Dutch government over coal phaseout plans and by a Swedish company to sue the German state over its policies against nuclear and coal power.

In 2007, Ascent entered a joint venture with a state-owned Slovenian company called Geonergo to extract gas from Petišovci in eastern Slovenia and sell it to Croatian company INA. It says it has since invested €50m (US$59m) in the project.

In 2017, the company decided it needed to inject water underground to stimulate gas flow, known as fracking, and applied for government permission. Ascent’s lawyers say that they did not need to apply for this but Geonergo did so anyway “in an abundance of caution”.

In March 2019, the Slovenian Environment Agency (ARSO) ruled that the company must conduct an environmental impact assesment because the site is close to water sources.

Ascent’s lawyers said this decision went against expert opinions from several other government bodies and was “manifestly arbitrary and unreasonable”. They add that the Minister of the Environment and Spatial Planning’s public criticism of the company and leaks from ARSO to the press show that ARSO was “biased” and its decision was “politically motivated”.

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Geonergo challenged ARSO’s decision but, in May 2020, the Slovenian court ruled against the firms. In July, Ascent’s London lawyers told Slovenia they were taking legal action.

Lidija Živčič, from Friends of the Earth Slovenia, told Climate Home News she feared the Slovenian government elected in March 2020 would reverse the previous government’s opposition to fracking.

The previous government, led by Marjan Šarec, had been preparing a law which would ban fracking. It was voted out before the law could pass and, Živčič said, Janez Janša’s new government seems much more in favour of fracking.

If fracking went ahead in Petišovci, Živčič said, the nearby sources of drinking water and thermal waters could be affected by the fracking chemicals. In other countries, poorly-built shallow fracking wells have injected gas into underground freshwater aquifers.

Fracking could also damage nearby ecosystems and would contribute to global climate change, Živčič said. The site is near the borders of Hungary and Croatia.

Japan blocks green reform of major energy investment treaty

Friends of the Earth has brought attention to the case at the same time as members of the ECT are negotiating ‘modernisation’ of the treaty, which dates from the early 1990s.

The European Union wants to improve governments’ ‘right to regulate’ on climate change without facing legal action under ECT but nations like Japan and Kazakhstan are resisting reform.

Luxembourg’s energy minister has said his nation and others could leave the ECT if its environmental protections are not improved. Russia and Italy have already left the treaty after it was used to sue them.

An Australian mining company called Prairie Mining also announced ECT legal action this week. It says the Polish government has unfairly damaged its coal mining prospects by not renewing one of its concessions and granting part of another to a rival firm.

The post Fracking company sues Slovenia over ‘unreasonable’ environmental protections appeared first on Climate Home News.

Several countries are grappling with the effects of this extreme heat, which include wildfires and water restrictions.

Temperatures have soared past 40C in parts of Italy, Greece and the Balkans, with the extreme heat spreading north into the Czech Republic and southern Poland.

Some areas are having their hottest temperatures since 2007 when severe heat also brought dangerous conditions to the southeast of the continent.

The heat is associated with a high pressure system over southeast Europe, while the jet stream guides weather systems over Britain and northern Europe. In 2007 this type of split weather pattern across Europe persisted for weeks, bringing heavy rains and flooding to England with scorching temperatures for Greece and the Balkans.

Europe is a very well-studied region for heatwaves. There are two main reasons for this: first, it has abundant weather observations and this allows us to evaluate our climate models and quantify the effects of climate change with a high degree of confidence. Second, many leading climate science groups are located in Europe and are funded primarily to improve understanding of climate change influences over the region.

The first study to link a specific extreme weather event to climate change examined the record hot European summer of 2003. Since then, multiple studies have assessed the role of human influences in European extreme weather. Broadly speaking, we expect hotter summers and more frequent and intense heatwaves in this part of the world.

We also know that climate change increased deaths in the 2003 heatwaves and that climate change-related deaths are projected to rise in the future.

To understand the role of climate change in the latest European heatwave, I looked at changes in the hottest summer days over southeast Europe – a region that incorporates Italy, Greece and the Balkans.

I calculated the frequency of extremely hot summer days in a set of climate model simulations, under four different scenarios: a natural world without human influences, the world of today (with about 1C of global warming), a 1.5C global warming world, and a 2C warmer world. I chose the 1.5C and 2C benchmarks because they correspond to the targets described in the Paris Agreement.

As the heatwave is ongoing, we don’t yet know exactly how much hotter than average this event will turn out to be. To account for this uncertainty I used multiple thresholds based on historically very hot summer days. These thresholds correspond to an historical 1-in-10-year hottest day, a 1-in-20-year hottest day, and a new record for the region exceeding the observed 2007 value.

While we don’t know exactly where the 2017 event will end up, we do know that it will exceed the 1-in-10 year threshold and it may well breach the higher thresholds too.

Climate change is increasing the frequency of hot summer days in southeast Europe. Likelihoods of the hottest summer days exceeding the historical 1-in-10 year threshold, one-in-20 year threshold and the current record are shown for four scenarios: a natural world, the current world, a 1.5C world, and a 2C world. Best estimate likelihoods are shown with 90% confidence intervals in parentheses. (Credit: Author provided)

Whatever threshold I used, I found that climate change has greatly increased the likelihood of extremely hot summer days. The chance of extreme hot summer days, like this event, has increased by at least fourfold because of human-caused climate change.

My analysis shows that under natural conditions the kind of extreme heat we’re seeing over southeast Europe would be rare. In contrast, in the current world and possible future worlds at the Paris Agreement thresholds for global warming, heatwaves like this would not be particularly unusual at all.

There is also a benefit to limiting global warming to 1.5C rather than 2C as this reduces the relative frequency of these extreme heat events.

As this event comes to an end we know that Europe can expect more heatwaves like this one. We can, however, prevent such extreme heat from becoming the new normal by keeping global warming at or below the levels agreed upon in Paris.

Andrew King is a climate extremes research fellow at the University of Melbourne. This article was first published on The Conversation.

The post Sweltering European summer has human fingerprints appeared first on Climate Home News.

Belgrade (Pic: {Pixabay)

By Alex Kirby

One dollar in three earned by the economy of Serbia is accounted for by those of its citizens who die early because of the country’s soaring air pollution.

The finding, by the World Health Organisation (WHO), is contained in a report published by a campaign group that argues for an end to coal-burning throughout Europe by 2040 to protect health and to reduce the carbon emissions that drive climate change.

The WHO list of the economic cost of deaths from air pollution (both outdoor and indoor), as a percentage of GDP, puts Serbia in second place, with 33.5% of its gross domestic product spent on this increasingly avoidable mortality.

For comparison, the UK figure is barely one-tenth as large: 3.7%.

Top of the list, which covers all the countries of the WHO’s European region, is Georgia, at 35.2%. The report, however, concentrates on the West Balkans, and so does not include the Caucasus countries.

The WHO published the list in 2010, but the figures it reports are the latest available and were repeated in another report published by the WHO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2015.

The group campaigning for an end to coal-burning in Europe is the Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL).

It says the public health costs from coal-fired power plants in five Western Balkan countries, with seven of the 10 most polluting coal plants in the whole of Europe, may be as high as €8.5 billion (US$9.4 billion) a year.

The calculation by HEAL includes costs directly related to air pollution from the plants, including from premature deaths, respiratory and cardiovascular hospital admissions, new cases of chronic bronchitis and lower respiratory problems, medication use, and days of restricted activity caused by ill-health, including lost working days.

The region depends heavily on coal and lignite and air pollutants in the Western Balkans, HEAL says, are at levels up to two-and-a-half times above national air quality safety limits, well beyond WHO recommendations.

The WHO says that “air pollution at current levels in European cities is responsible for a significant burden of deaths, hospital admissions and exacerbation of symptoms, especially for cardiorespiratory disease”.

It adds: “This potential for a major improvement in population health should be taken into account when developing energy policies”

Anne Stauffer, deputy director of HEAL, says the report “uncovers the myth that coal is the cheapest form of energy.

“Opting out of coal offers the prospect of a healthier and more prosperous future. The EU should encourage the change to a healthy energy future by significantly increasing financial support for renewables and energy savings.”

The report says a significant part of the Balkan pollution is carried on the wind and affects people elsewhere in Europe. It says that Europe, in this context, includes countries as far away as western Russia and Norway, and the EU’s current efforts to ensure cleaner air in member countries should not stop at its own borders.

Strong support

There is strong local support for phasing out coal among leading health policy-makers in the Western Balkans, HEAL says.

Serbia’s State Secretary for Health, Professor Berislav Vekić, says: “Reducing the level of pollutants in the air would produce very significant health benefits. This potential for a major improvement in population health should be taken into account when developing energy policies.”

Garret Tankosic-Kelly, principal and founder of SEE Change Net, says: “Choosing cleaner air is a no-brainer.

“Our expert energy models clearly show that the enormous potential for solar, wind and biomass – combined with much more energy efficiency – would lead to a cleaner, fairer, and more efficient energy system in South East Europe, and for the same cost as the currently planned investments in dirty lignite.”

Governments, including those in the Western Balkans, are being urged by HEAL and SEE Change Net to close existing coal plants and not to build any new ones.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Pic: Marko Capek

By Sophie Yeo

After spending a night in the freezing mountains of Tajikistan, a cold shower is not just bracing – it is brutal.

But for many Tajik people, hot water is not an option. In winter, outside of the big cities, many rural households can access electricity for just one to three hours a day.

With temperatures dropping below zero, this can make life unpleasant for those who live and work in mountainous regions.

That is why the UN has stepped in with a new project to enable women to build their own solar hot water systems.

“There is data to show than an average temperature in a class room is 10-11C. It is just normal that you’re freezing in school,” Robert Pasicko, who works on low carbon projects at the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Croatia, told RTCC.

“The main idea was to heat the water, which can be used as pre-heated water for cooking, tea, and washing. Warm water is quite a commodity. If you don’t have basic needs your life can get really bad.”

The team in Croatia was invited to work in Tajikistan, following their success at installing solar systems in villages cut off from the electric grid during the Bosnian War of the 1990s.

Leaving for Russia

Tajikistan has its own problems.

The lack of electricity means that people have to rely on firewood for heat, which is driving deforestation in the country. 70% of Tajikistan’s mountain woodlands have disappeared since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of its fuel subsidies.

There is also an absence of men, with around one million of them leaving every year to find work mainly in Russia.

But the country also has over 300 days of sun every year, making it particularly suited to clean, off grid solar energy projects.

And the annual departure of the men means that the women have learnt to become more resilient.

“They call them handy women. They take care of the household, providing energy – it’s their task. You cannot rely on men,” said Pasicko.

Pic: Marko Capek

The Croatian team therefore decided to teach the Tajikistan women to make solar water heaters themselves.

This week, in Jilikul village next to the Afghan border, 15 women took part in a workshop where they were taught to assemble the technology.

Each system is capable of heating 40 litres of water in just a few hours – a dramatic improvement on the previous method of leaving bottles of water to heat in the sun.

Now the plan is to extend and improve the project by setting up informal cooperatives of women, so that they can buy the materials as cheaply as possible and holding more workshops across the border in Kyrgyzstan.

The idea is that the women will then be able to train others who are in a similar predicament themselves.

The UNDP team has even produced a manual to help the idea spread.

And, at the request of the women, plans are now afoot to bring more skills to the region, including how to build clean cook stoves, reducing the problem of indoor air pollution.

“They were smiling all the time and happy they were able to learn something,” said Pasicko. “They said please come back with some new things.”

The post Tajikistan’s women take solar power into their own hands appeared first on Climate Home News.

Pic: Balkan Youth Climate Movement

By Sophie Yeo

In May 2014, almost two decades after the close of the Bosnian war, a mine exploded near the northern village of Cerik.

One of the 9,000 landmines left over from the 1992-95 conflict had been dislodged by floods, setting off a blast in which nobody was hurt.

The floods themselves were less benign. In early 2014, torrents tore through Bosnia and Serbia, bringing landslides and the death of around 80 people. Authorities say the damage will cost more to clean up than the three years of conflict in the Balkans.

Since then, recovery efforts have been hampered by more flooding caused by heavy rainfall.

Yet residents of the Balkans are still reluctant to talk about climate change, despite evidence that warmer temperatures could have been behind the record-breaking destruction, and may bring worse impacts in the future.

Three years of war in what was once a middle-income country in Yugoslovia have left their mark. As well as killing thousands of people, it cost around US $100billion and displaced around half the country’s 4.4 million pre-war population, plunging the nation into poverty. Youth unemployment is currently around 50%.

Flooding in May in Bosnia and Serbia killed around 80 people (Pic: Ian Bancroft/Flickr)

“It is hard to fight against climate change in a developing country like Bosnia, and it is hard to explain to people we don’t need the factories that are polluting the air and changing the temperature, because everyone wants more work,” says Maja Bradaric, a 22-year old climate activist from Bosnia, whose family home was destroyed in the floods.

Other countries across the Balkan region, including Croatia, Serbia, and Kosovo, face similar problems, where environmental concerns are drowned out in a tide of poverty, post-conflict recovery and the psychological thumbprint of Communism.

The lucrative layers of coal and other minerals sitting beneath the countries add another incentive for Balkan citizens to close their eyes to the problem, even if they can’t shut their lungs to the plumes of smoke and soot they bring with them.

For instance, in Kosovo, home to 1.8 million people and two power plants (with a third on its way), air pollution is estimated to cause 835 premature deaths every year.

Balkan Youth Climate Movement

In the wake of the floods, in a whitewashed house on the Croatian island of Šolta, around 50 young people from the Balkans assembled in July for a six day gathering on climate change in their region.

This meeting of the Balkan Youth Climate Movement was organised by Maruška Mileta, a 24-year-old Croatian who think young people should be at the vanguard of the fight against climate change in the Balkans.

It is the first time that a regional event on climate change has taken place in the region, where global warming remains off the radar for civil society groups – even environmental ones.

Pic: Balkan Climate Youth Movement

Across the region, the challenge is still to convert the dialogue to “Is climate change happening?” to “Let’s do something about it,” explains Mileta.

“But it’s hard because we are faced with many social and political issues,” she says, citing not only unemployment and the deep financial crisis, but also homophobia, nationalism, corruption and the influence of the Catholic Church.

“I thought that we needed to do something regionally, create a regional youth climate platform, as nationally in Balkans it wouldn’t really work,” continues Mileta.

High levels of poverty make it challenging for countries to face the problem individually, yet the region’s fractious history means it has been difficult to establish cross-border cooperation.

Communist culture

If the Balkans wants its own grassroots climate movement, it will be up to youth to lead the way. The under-30s are the first generation to have matured free from both the influence of divisive nationalism and the repression of Communist dictatorships.

Under Communism, which was established across Yugoslavia in 1946 following World War II, older generations fell out of the habit of rebellion, says Mileta.

“The experiences of living under Communism and then war left a huge mark on people in terms of not having the ”culture” of mobilising thousands of people on the streets,” she says. “Since the 90s, there hasn’t really been a huge protest with tens or hundreds of thousands of people, at least not for the right reasons. It is hard to get people on the street.”

During the old Communist regime, environmental organisations were a foreign concept, explains Nataša Crnkovic, a 26-year-old activist from Bosnia – and those harbouring anti-government sentiments simply did not exist.

“There were some, but more like mountaineering clubs or scouts – not something like what is present now. They were for nature lovers, not for people complaining about something.”

Following the Dayton Agreement in 1995, which brought peace to Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, international donations came flooding into the region, aiming to rebuild the lives and the economy of the countries brutalised by three years of war.

Some of these funds went to civil society groups, which allowed a trickle of environmental organisations to well up within the countries.

Members of the Balkan Youth Climate Movement play in the sea around the Croatian island of Šolta (Pic: Balkan Climate Youth Movement)

Initially, these avoided tackling climate change directly – an issue that could compromise efforts to quickly rebuild the economy and get people back in work.

But it is only recently that young people, free from the lingering impressions of Communism and able to take advantage of advancing liberties, have started to make the connection.

“I don’t feel isolated because I have travelled, I have seen,” says Festë Isufi, a 19-year-old student from Kosovo, currently studying in Finland.

“In general, my generation are isolated because we have visa restrictions. Going to embassies and spending a couple of hours there is not something everyone is volunteering to do. But as an individual I have been very free to see places and listen to lectures about climate change everywhere.”

She adds that the new push towards regional youth collaboration could make a new beginning in another way: “I know in Balkans we have had a lot of history with wars. But our generation, we can get along with each other. We have moved forward and this is how we can do it.”

Crossroads

Mileta believes that the Balkan Climate Youth Movement is just the beginning. She hopes to lead the group to the UN’s climate conference in Paris 2015, raising the profile of the usually silent region.

But she, and other youth in the region, are working against the clock. The Balkans currently face another turning point: whether they lock into a future of dirty energy, or decide to harness their potential for clean, renewable energy.

“Basically, all the dirty projects are being dumped in this region,” said Mileta, highlighting the case of Kosovo C – a proposed 600 megawatt coal power plant.

It’s currently the only coal project to receive the backing of the World Bank following its decision to stop financing barring certain “exceptional circumstances”, which World Bank President Jim Yong Kim deems Kosovo C to be.

Meanwhile, Croatia plans to open the Adriatic Sea to further offshore oil and gas drilling, while Chevron has started fracking operations in Romania.

All the while, as Kosovo’s air pollution and the recent flooding shows, the impacts of these projects and of climate change generally are beginning to take their toll.

It is up to youth to dispel the lethargy of the past, said Bradaric. She hopes that the floods which destroyed her house could one day prove a tool in this mission, but it will have to be broached carefully.

“We think it’s still a bit fresh for us we walk in and talk about climate change while people are still fighting for their homes. It’s hard for people to talk about it.”

But she adds: “Maybe it’s just because we haven’t tried.

“Maybe I will be surprised with the reaction of people. Maybe they will be prepared to change.”

The post Youth raise climate awareness in flood-hit Balkans appeared first on Climate Home News.

By Gerard Wynn

Only three European Union member states have made sufficient steps to meet annual energy savings targets under the bloc’s recent revised efficiency law, a report found on Wednesday.

The findings followed a warning by the EU’s executive that more than half of the 28 member states had failed to adopt efficiency standards for buildings, under an additional, buildings performance law.

Under the Energy Efficiency Directive, countries have to achieve energy savings equivalent to 1.5 percent of annual consumption from 2014 to 2020.

EU countries have until the end of this month to show how they intend to achieve the goal, under their National Energy Efficiency Action Plans.

Many have opted to require electricity utilities to make the savings, for example by upgrading home insulation and passing the extra costs to energy consumers.

Most EU countries would fail to meet the target, the Coalition for Energy Savings said in a report published on Wednesday.

“Only three plans, Denmark, Ireland and Croatia, out of the 27 published, provide a credible and meaningful case for how the governments will achieve their savings targets,” the lobby group said.

“Overall, the plans are a weak start for implementation. A lot more needs to be done rapidly to ensure commitments to energy efficiency are honoured and legal requirements are respected.”

“The most common problems concern incorrect calculation of the savings target; eligibility of measures, in particular, energy taxation; additionality of the savings (such as savings from buildings standards which may not be above the EU minimum requirements); and double counting of the same savings resulting from different measures.”

The Energy Efficiency Directive has set an overall, non-binding target for the bloc to improve its energy efficiency by 20 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels.

The European Commission may make recommendations for additional targets through 2030, in a review of the present directive which it is due to publish in June.

Buildings

Efficiency has acquired extra significance in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, which has shown how energy-dependent the EU is on Russia.

The EU does not have access to the fossil fuel resources of economic rivals including the United States and China. In 2012, its oil and gas import bill was more than €400 billion, far exceeding China and the United States. The International Energy Agency projects rising import dependency.

Wednesday’s report came the day after an announcement by the European Commission that it was taking Belgium and Finland to court over their failure to adopt into national law measures under the EU’s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive.

Under the EU law, member states had to establish and apply minimum energy performance requirements for all buildings; ensure the certification of buildings’ energy performance; and require the regular inspection of heating and air conditioning systems.

In addition, the directive requires that Member States ensure that all new buildings are so-called nearly zero-energy buildings by 2021.

“Using less energy is paramount for ensuring security of supply in Europe,” said Günther Oettinger, the EU Energy Commissioner.

“40% of EU energy consumption is in the buildings’ sector and it is here where the most energy can be saved.”

In addition to Belgium and Finland, the Commission said that it had concerns over the implementation of the buildings directive by another 13 EU countries.

The post Just three EU countries on track to meet energy savings target – report appeared first on Climate Home News.