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New study: Clean energy investments will pay off at scale
How much investment money is needed to create 60,000 jobs, and how much to save half a million tonnes of CO2 emissions annually? These are the kinds of calculations that a new Bankwatch study has been making with an eye on the uses of the EU's future Cohesion policy funds in central and eastern Europe.
This article is from Issue 53 of our quarterly newsletter Bankwatch Mail
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No half measures: Investment needs in energy efficiency and renewables in the CEE countries (pdf) examines how much money is needed to create jobs and reach Europe’s climate targets. Assessing seven countries in central and eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia), investment needs of EUR 172 billion over seven years were identified for energy efficiency and renewable energy programmes.
The current plans for the Structural and Cohesion Funds (2014-20) unfortunately look rather different: the roughly EUR 31 billion proposed by the European Commission for low-carbon measures in all EU countries would not nearly be enough.
Yet those 60,000 jobs and huge emissions' savings could be achieved by investing EUR 2.1 billion into the renovation of houses in Bulgaria – and 680,000 households would see a huge difference in their heating bills. These benefits, the study finds, can be replicated in all the CEE countries analysed.
As the study’s title suggests, it is not half baked measures that we need, but a dedicated pursuit of low-carbon investments that would mitigate both climate change and the impacts of the economic crisis. Increased climate earmarking in the future EU budget will pay off. This is no moment to be considering reductions in the budget's climate investments, or for low-carbon money to be hijacked by fossil fuel projects.
