Publications

Transport is the only sector where greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing. Without decisive new action, transport GHG emissions are expected to grow by 74% until 2050. The Commission has pledged that at least 20% of the proposed €1 trillion EU budget for 2014-2020 will go towards climate mitigation and adaptation goals. This paper outlines how these commitments can be put into practice in the regulations on CEF and the TEN-T guidelines.

Due to a number of so far unfulfilled project measures in an EBRD financed safety modernisation project in Ukraine (K2/R4 post start-up safety modernisation programme), Bankwatch has asked the EBRD's Chief Evaluator for a thorough evaluation before further loans for Ukraine's nuclear energy company Energoatom are being considered.

The Coalition for Sustainable EU Funds supports the principle of thematic concentration in the European Commission's Cohesion Policy legislative package from October 2011. However, changes brought forward by some Member States risk hampering a critical mass of investments in areas that help deliver on EU agreed targets by 2020, especially the Europe 2020 Strategy targets.

The 68 MW Ombla underground hydropower project, for which the EBRD approved a EUR 123.2 loan in 22 November 2011, is once again under fire, this time in the European Parliament. Both the project itself and its approval process have attracted widespread criticism from civil society and biodiversity experts as the project location forms part of a future Natura 2000 site. In 2008 the Croatian State Institute for Nature Protection declared the project “unacceptable for nature”.

In February 2009 the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, together with the European Investment Bank and the World Bank Group launched a series of meetings with commercial banks, coordinated with the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund, to shore up a weak link in the financial systems of the European Union. The weak link is in so-called ‘emerging Europe’, the countries of central and eastern Europe that are in the EU, but are outside the European Monetary Union, the Euro-zone. These are mostly ex-Communist countries whose financial systems had remained undeveloped under communism.