Mountain villages in the country’s northeast protest for changes to the routing of high voltage lines in a series of local protests.

Unsuccessful in making a coal power plant reduce abhorrent pollution levels, the village of Golemo Selo, Bulgaria is trying to “move” to a new municipality, hoping to have more say in matters concerning its citizens’ health and livelihoods.

Levels of particulate matter (fine dust) in Rosia de Jiu, Romania were up to 20 times above the limit suggested by the World Health Organisation, show the results of our independent monitoring.

Enver Hoxha, the former communist dictator in Albania, ruled in such a bizarre way that he found himself ostracised by other communist rulers. Among others he flooded the country of 3 million people with 750 000 concrete bunkers. Those bunkers were built ignoring people, nature but also military rules - as some of them were facing each other.

The European Union’s and China’s joint commitment to climate action is tarnished by Chinese support for and the EU’s neglect of coal projects in the Balkans, as a new briefing shows. But it is still not too late to change course.

We are passing through the canyon of the river Vrbas, in north-west Bosnia-Herzegovina. I am looking through a car window, mouth wide open in awe. While I look up to the rocky, edgy peaks hundreds of meters above and down to the heavenly blue river, I am wondering why anyone would want to dam this river, flood the canyon and destroy its beauty.

Then again, rather than seeing beauty, hydropower companies see wasted water resources, or in the words of a Bosnian official “euros flowing away in vain.”