Yahoo News 10 Dec 10;
BUCHAREST (AFP) – Eastern European countries are among the best performers in meeting Kyoto climate change goals but the sharp fall in their greenhouse gas emissions is not due to ambitious policies, environmental groups say.
While the future of the Kyoto protocol might be at stake at the UN climate talks in Mexico, Eastern European countries are on the way to surpassing their targets of an average of 8.0 percent reduction of emission between 2008 and 2012, compared to the benchmark year of 1990.
Bulgaria and Romania have about halved their emissions while the Czech Republic reduced them by 27.5 percent, according to official figures.
"Bulgaria has been a real champion in meeting its Kyoto engagements", WWF climate expert Georgy Stefanov told AFP.
But this success, and similar success in Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic, is mainly due to the restructuring of the economy after the fall of communism, when vast and polluting industrial complexes closed their doors, the WWF and ministries of the environment in those countries stress.
"In Bulgaria, big industrial polluters have only recently, over the past year or two, started offering technological improvements in their plants to lower greenhouse gas emissions and their harmful effect on the environment", Stefanov said.
"Bulgaria's industry is far from the EU average energy intensity levels, using four to eight times more primary energy resources for the production of the same GDP value compared to other EU countries."
The country also lags behind in terms of energy efficiency in buildings while in its forests there is more cutting than planting, environmental groups say.
In general, Eastern European states did not put in place ambitious policies to move towards a low-carbon economy and are "lagging behind", according to a study recently published by Ecofys, a consulting company on renewable energy.
In the Czech Republic, carbon emission have stagnated at a very high level since the collapse of Communist heavy industry", Greenpeace's spokesman Jan Rovensky told AFP.
"They amount to 12.5 tonnes per inhabitant, the fifth worst score among OECD countries."
The Czech government was proud to announce that the emission of greenhouse gases decreased by 4.1 percent in 2009 compared to 2008.
For Greenpeace though, this decrease was more due to slowing economic activity in times of crisis than to a focused policy to fight climate change.
In Romania, WWF's representative Luminita Tanasie told AFP she deplored the "absence of a real strategy to develop a low-carbon economy".
Even if overall emissions plummeted, industrial pollution rose by seven percent between 2006 and 2007, the last figures available, and a lot more progress is needed in the transport and energy sector, the NGO said.
Bucharest hopes to earn more than 2.5 billion euros (3.3 billion dollars) until 2012 by trading its carbon credits in order to finance eco-friendly projects. But the scheme announced in April "still has not led to any money being cashed", the Romanian ministry of Environment said to AFP.
Warsaw and Prague says they have already earned tens of millions of euros with such a mechanism.
The money has been used to improve the isolation of buildings in the Czech republic while Poland put the 80 million euros gained on a special account to support measures reducing the impact of climate change (reforestation, renewable energy...).
Bulgaria is currently suspended from the Kyoto carbon emission trading as it could not guarantee the trustworthiness and transparency of its system for recording greenhouse gas emissions.
