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A new body to promote tech entrepreneurship, an enhanced funding programme, a flagship tech event - all these recent signs point to Portugal’s new ambition to become an innovation hub.

Indonesia, Poland, Vietnam and other nations pledged on Thursday (4 November) to phase out use of coal-fired power and stop building plants, in a deal at the COP26 climate summit that failed to win support from the United States and large coal consumers such as China.

Kazakhstan aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, which means expanding the share of renewables to 83% and halting heat generation from coal after 2050, Serikkali Brekeshev told EURACTIV in an interview.

In today's news from the Capitals, find out more about an increasing number of Czechs getting the jab following the announcement that bars and restaurants will check COVID-19 certificates, Bulgaria's appaling treatment of vulnerable people, and so much more.

Britain on Thursday (4 November) became the first country in the world to approve a potentially game-changing COVID-19 antiviral pill jointly developed by US-based Merck & Co Inc and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, in a boost to the fight against the pandemic.

Lithuania, last week, started building a 3.4-metre high steel fence topped with 0.6 metres of razor wire along its shared land border with Belarus, Reuters reports. The fence is aimed at warding off migrants entering from Belarus. Lithuania has set aside some €152m to erect the 500km fence, which it intends to complete by September next year.

Russia has expelled a Dutch journalist, Tom Vennink, from the Volkskrant newspaper for "administrative violations", three months after it expelled a senior BBC correspondent, Sarah Rainsford. "It is not acceptable for the Netherlands when a journalist is forced out of the country against his will," Dutch foreign minister Ben Knapen said. Vennink had once failed to register his home address and seek permission to visit a Russian region, Russia said.

In Serbia, EBRD supported privately financed wind farms at Cibuk – the biggest in the Western Balkans region – and Kovačica, helping Serbia reduce its dependence on ageing coal-fired plants running on polluting lignite. Credit: EBRD

By Vanora Bennett
LONDON, Nov 5 2021 (IPS)

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has announced its intention to double the mobilisation of private sector climate financing by 2025.

The way to achieve this target was set out in an Action Plan on Mobilising Private Capital for Climate Finance, unveiled at COP26, the global climate summit. With this plan the EBRD will support the transition to a low carbon economy in its countries of operations.

The EBRD’s plan spans the full range of activities to stimulate investment from green and sustainability-linked bonds through innovative financing mechanisms for industrial decarbonisation to targeted loans to support for the circular economy.

At the heart is a focus on policy activities to develop a regulatory environment that makes low-carbon investments commercially viable.

These activities, from the implementation of renewable energy auctions to the design of low-carbon sector pathways, are intended to trigger sustainable demand for climate-friendly investment and in turn for private capital.

“Globally, there is a significant increase in private capital committed to green finance. The EBRD will help direct that money to its countries of operations. Its ability to do so rests not on a single approach or instrument, but on a broad range of bespoke interventions. Some seek to increase the supply of private capital to EBRD countries of operations,” said EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso.

“However, the key focus of the Bank’s work is to increase the demand for this capital: the supply of bankable investment projects that attract financial flows seeking a return. This requires approaches that respond to the specific situations of markets and clients.”

Together with other multilateral development banks (MDBs), the Bank plays a leading role in helping to decarbonise economies and enable the transition to a more sustainable future, with a focus on involving the private sector in tackling climate change.

A major challenge in emerging economies and developing countries is a shortage of bankable climate projects. Several factors limit the supply of such projects. The most fundamental is the lack of either an implicit or an explicit carbon price. Without a carbon price, many green investments are not commercially viable.

The 2021 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference is key to delivering climate action, with countries making more ambitious climate pledges to move closer to the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C, with the aim of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050.

Financiers, including MBDs like the EBRD, are preparing to deliver more support to realise those plans.

The EBRD is supporting these goals not only with investments in green energy, energy efficiency and energy savings. The Bank is also supporting especially exposed countries like Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan to develop roadmaps to low or zero carbon economies and it is addressing the need for a ‘just transition’ with recent investments, for instance in North Macedonia.

The EBRD brings two recent commitments of its own on enhancing its climate action. One is to increase the proportion of its green investments to more than 50 per cent of the total by 2025. The second is by 2023 to align all its operations with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

The EBRD supports the green transition in the 38 economies in Europe, Asia and Africa where it currently invests.

Vanora Bennett is EBRD green spokeswoman

 

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Eigentlich sollten zwei Kunstflieger die Gesellschaft einer argentinischen Hochzeit unterhalten. Doch plötzlich gerät ein Flugzeug ins Trudeln und stürzt auf eine Mutter und dreijährige Tochter.

With regard to EU enlargement, the citizens of the Western Balkans, but also many EU citizens, expect EU institutions and the member states to abandon hypocrisy, writes Aleksandra Tomanić.

Only a quarter of senior positions in economics at universities and business schools are held by women, according to a recent study. Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank (ECB), pushes for more women in economics, saying “diversity is key to creating knowledge”.

Portugal is set to hold snap elections on 30 January, said the country's president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. Portugal's national assembly had rejected the government's draft budget for 2022. De Sousa said it was the first time a draft budget had been knocked back in decades.

Representatives of the EU's climate negotiating team at COP26, including EU presidency holder Slovenia and its chief negotiator Tina Kobilšek, reaffirmed their commitment to a successful outcome at the UN climate talks during a press conference in Glasgow on Thursday (4 November).

The city of Vienna will restrict access to cultural events and hairdressers, bars, and clubs to people who are either vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 by the end of the week – effectively banning unvaccinated from participating in Vienna’s...

The Latvian parliament on Thursday (4 November) allowed businesses to fire workers who refuse to either get a COVID-19 vaccine or transfer to remote work, as the country battles one of the worst COVID-19 waves in European Union.

BiH Presidency Serb member Milorad Dodik is far from being the only source of problems in the country, the head of the House of Peoples of the BiH Parliament and leader of the most prominent Croatian party in BiH, HDZ...

Sberbank Europe announced the selling of its subsidiaries in Croatia, BiH, Hungary, Serbia and Slovenia to the Belgrade-based AIK Bank, Slovenia’s Gorenjska Banka and Agri Europe Cyprus Limited. Those three entities are owned by Serbian entrepreneur Miodrag Kostić, known in...

More than 1,000 universities and science academies in Europe have urged the European Commission to let Britain quickly join its €95.5bn 'Horizon' research programme, following 10-months of Brexit-linked delays. Excluding the UK was "endangering current and future plans for collaboration" and could "result in a major weakening of our collective research", they said in an open letter. Only a "global community" could "move forward from the Covid pandemic", they said.

China's expulsion of Lithuania's ambassador from Beijing in August due to its close ties with Taiwan was a "wake-up all for Europe", Lithuania's deputy foreign Arnoldas Pranckevičius told a US security forum Thursday, Reuters reports. "China is trying to make an example out of us - a negative example, so that other countries don't necessarily follow that path," he said, while calling for US and EU solidarity on the case.

A Global Witness report on Friday found the EU body responsible for greenlighting subsidies for gas infrastructure (ENTSOG) is refusing to disclose whether there is a conflict of interest among its members. Three-quarters of ENTSOG's board members work with companies represented by the lobby group Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE), while one-third of GIE executives also sit on ENTSOG's board. GIE companies received over €4bn in EU funding since 2013.