While the EU’s €672.5 billion Recovery and Resilience Facility is supposed to ensure a ‘green recovery’, the recovery plans are financing projects that risk damaging nature, according to a report published on 3 June by CEE Bankwatch and Euronatur.
This report exposes the biodiversity-damaging investments and reforms in the stimulus packages of nine Central and Eastern European countries.
For example, in Bulgaria and Latvia, projects to increase renewable energy highlight the potential conflict between climate action and biodiversity.
Water management projects in Hungary, Croatia, Latvia and Poland will support the construction of reservoirs, pumping stations, canals or river regulation, often in highly sensitive areas, including Natura 2000 sites, threatening to turn rivers and streams into dead channels and lifeless ponds
The cases of Slovenia, Estonia, the Czech Republic and Romania show how forestry projects that seem positive at first glance may instead encourage even more intensive logging.
Many of these projects were planned and negotiated behind closed doors, without information on their location and without proper assessment of their impact on nature, the NGOs point out. They hope that similar projects will not receive EU funding in the future.
See the report: https://aeur.eu/f/1xo (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)