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Climate Action
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Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central
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Climate chronicle of the war
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its
second year, coal mining towns are not only on the
front line of our country’s resistance but also at
the heart of our vision to rebuild a fairer, safer
and greener Ukraine, writes Anna Ackermann. Anna
Ackermann is board member at the Ukrainian NGO
Ecoaction – Centre for Environmental Initiatives.
Once home to 14,000 people, the small coal-mining
town of Vuhledar in the Donetsk region of eastern
Ukraine lies in ruins. For months, the town has
been the focus of successive Russian assaults.
Prior to the war most of its residents worked in
nearby coal mines and factories, but like many of
Ukraine’s occupied and frontline coal towns,
energy, water and other critical infrastructure
has been destroyed, and the mines irreversibly
flooded.
It’s not easy to talk about climate change
and carbon-free power when your country is a
battlefield. That’s the hard reality environmental
advocates and clean energy companies have
confronted in Ukraine in the wake of the Russian
invasion. But they say renewable energy has
nonetheless gained wider public support as a
reliable power source amid fighting that has
spurred rolling blackouts. “War, it seems for us,
created a new understanding of renewables and
maybe also created new possibilities for further
development of renewables,” said Artem Semenyshyn,
executive director of the Solar Energy Association
of Ukraine.
A Ukrainian lawyer, who founded the
war-torn country’s leading campaign against
Russian fossil
fuels, has been refused entry to the world’s
most prominent energy summit. Svitlana Romanko
travelled from her home in Ivano-Frankivsk,
western Ukraine,
in late February to Houston,
Texas
to attend CERAWeek, an annual summit which
attracts the heads of major oil and gas companies
and industry bodies along with senior government
officials. CERAWeek speakers this year included
both John Kerry, the special presidential envoy
for climate, ExxonMobil chief executive Darren
Woods, and the Cop28 climate summit president, Dr
Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also CEO of the Abu
Dhabi National Oil Company.
The Irpin community will receive two
mobile solar power plants by the Ukrainian company
Knes for the Kozynets Outpatient Clinic of Family
Medicine and the Irpin Lyceum of Innovative
Technologies. The panels have been purchased
through the help of the Finnish non -governmental
organization Ekoenergy Label, reports "Ukrainian
Wind Energy Association" on Facebook. It is noted
that the WWEA World Wind Energy Association and
the Global100re Global Platform have launched a
Renewables4UKRAINE campaign to collect funds for
buying and transferring equipment to Ukraine, in
particular, autonomous solar systems. As part of
the program, people from all over the world are
raising money to help Ukraine. Ekoenergy Label
joined the campaign.
Astana is upbeat about boosting oil
exports, despite caveats over how the war in
Ukraine may impact markets and questions about its
recently launched shipments to Europe. Kazakhstan
plans to increase oil supplies via its main export
pipeline to Russia by over a third by the end of
next year, Energy Minister Bolat Akchulakov said
this week during an industry conference in Texas.
That is fighting talk given the troubles that have
beset the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, whose
supplies were halted four times last year.
Official explanations
for the disruptions have not convinced skeptics,
who believe Moscow is using the CPC as political
leverage over Kazakhstan to coerce it
(unsuccessfully) to support Russia’s war in
Ukraine.
A new study measures the effect of the
Russia-Ukraine war on household energy costs
worldwide. It’s nearly doubled, explain Klaus
Hubacek, Jin Yan and Yuru Guan at the University
of Groningen and Yuli Shan at the University of
Birmingham. Their study sums the costs of direct
energy like heating, cooling, lighting and
mobility, as well as the indirect costs through
the energy used to produce goods and services.
That doubling translates into an overall increase
in global household expenditure of between 2.7%
and 4.8%. That’s a big change. And those numbers
vary greatly when you look at individual nations
and households.
European Union countries and companies
should not sign new contracts to buy Russian
liquefied natural gas, as part of the bloc's
attempt to end its energy dependence on Moscow,
the EU's energy policy chief said on Thursday.
Russia curbed gas supplies to Europe last year
following its invasion of Ukraine, causing an
energy crisis of squeezed supplies and record-high
prices. The EU has vowed to quit Russian fossil
fuels by 2027, and replaced around two-thirds of
Russian gas last year. "We can and should get rid
of Russian gas completely as soon as possible,
still keeping in mind our security of supply," EU
energy commissioner Kadri Simson told a meeting of
EU lawmakers on Thursday.
After Russia’s February 24, 2022,
re-invasion of Ukraine, all eyes turned to the
brutal spectacle of Europe’s largest war since
1945. Yet, Russia’s ill-fated attempt to assert
its sphere of influence in Europe has not been
confined to a single battlefield. While the
situation remains dynamic, at the start of 2023,
it appears that Russia has lost its energy war on
Europe. Within a year, Europe has substantially
reduced its dependency on Russian fossil fuels,
while prices, which quadrupled at the outset of
the war, fell back to pre-war levels. Not only has
Russia’s energy war on Europe been unsuccessful,
but it may have the unintended consequence of
accelerating Europe’s energy transition over the
long term. Attempting to win recognition as Putin
the Great by uniting the Slavic lands of Russia,
Belarus, and Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir
Putin may be hailed instead as Putin the Green,
the man who convinced Europe to give up dependence
on fossil fuels. | |
Regional and world
news
Climate Dialogues is a project which aims
to increase capacities of climate
activists/experts in EECCA region as trainers
through providing learning sessions on climate
change, energy efficiency with decolonizing and
gender justice perspectives as well as soft skills
practices. Upon the arrival after the first event
in Georgia, Tbilisi participants are expected to
conduct trainings/learning sessions on selected
topics in their communities. Who is Climate
Dialogues for? Climate Dialogues is for anyone
trying to make a positive change on climate
policy/action in their community, society or
country. This includes but isn’t limited to: civil
activists, campaigners, content creators etc.
Uzbekistan plans to build a nuclear power
plant 40 km from the border with Kazakhstan and
the country's most populous Turkestan region.
Construction is planned in the Jizzakh region on
the shores of Lake Tuzkan. Next to it, just a few
tens of kilometers away, is the Shardara reservoir
- a source of drinking water for the whole city,
as well as a reservoir of strategic importance,
located on the transboundary Syrdarya River. The
human factor should not be discounted either. The
recent breakthrough of the Sardoba reservoir
occurred due to poor technical conditions. At the
same time, everything was fine in the reports.
Therefore, it is possible that in the event of an
earthquake, the nuclear power plant may be
damaged, which will lead to the leakage of
radioactive material. If this happens, then large
densely populated agglomerations of the country,
which includes the capital of Uzbekistan will fall
into the radiation impact zone.
A number of mega-projects implemented by
Azerbaijan over recent years have yielded very
successful results, elevating it to the status of
a central energy hub for Europe. Azerbaijan's rich
energy resources and Europe's drive for
diversification of its own supplies are key
elements that have pushed Baku to lead the way for
the construction of now operational oil and gas
pipelines from the Caspian region to the heart of
the shilly-shallying Europe at a time when the
relations between Moscow and Brussels were not at
the lowest ebb. Now that the relations between the
Kremlin and the West have further deteriorated in
the wake of the war in Ukraine, Baku's
determination to have independent access to
international markets via friendly regional
nations has led to the fruition and the number of
European nations purchasing Azerbaijani natural
resources, in particular, gas is on the rise.
CENN, within the EU-funded Georgia Climate
Action Project, in cooperation with partner
organisations, is announcing a call for women and
youth to participate in a thematic climate change
camp. The camp will be held at the Bulachauri
Green Centre on 3-8 April. The camp aims to
mobilize local communities to mainstream climate
change issues at municipal and regional levels.
Camp participants will receive thematic training
on human rights-based approach, climate change,
its causes, climate change mitigation and
effective adaptation, effective management of
water resources, and energy efficiency. As a
result of the camp, participants, together with
leaders, will develop four joint initiatives to
promote youth and women’s activism in the field of
climate change and empower youth and women to
address climate change issues at the local and
regional levels.
Doha Khan is a climate campaigner who
co-founded the South Australian branch of School
Strike 4 Climate at the age of 16. Now
studying medicine at Adelaide University, she
appears in the documentary Women
and the Power of Activism airing on SBS
VICELAND, which follows a group of young female
Aussie activists. Here, Khan talks about
subverting stereotypes and fighting for the future
we all need. My activism began in my teens. Social
media and the 24-hour news cycle meant I was
hearing day after day the impacts of climate
change. The lack of action of governments across
the world really motivated me, and the fact that I
was not able to vote, even though I knew so much
about the legal system, meant I was just a bit
pissed off. So when there was a chance to get
involved in something intended to shake up the
political discourse, I leapt on it.
European Union countries have agreed to
push for the global phaseout of fossil
fuels at COP28. It is part of the bloc’s
promise to support and accelerate the energy
transition ahead of the climate
summit in Dubai this November. Faced with
climate change, biodiversity
loss, pollution and the fallout of Russia’s
attack on Ukraine, the EU says that our dependence
on fossil fuels leaves us vulnerable. Market
volatility and geopolitical risk as well as the
environmental and climate impacts of
emissions-spewing fossil
fuels are all grave concerns. “The shift
towards a climate
neutral economy will require the global
phase-out of unabated fossil fuels,” the Council
stated in a text released on Thursday. Fossil fuel
use should peak in the near future if we are to
reach net zero, it adds, while acknowledging a
transitional role for natural gas.
A new way of sucking carbon dioxide from
the air and storing it in the sea has been
outlined by scientists. The authors say that this
novel approach captures CO2 from the atmosphere up
to three times more efficiently than current
methods. The warming gas can be transformed into
bicarbonate of soda and stored safely and cheaply
in seawater. The new method could speed up the
deployment of carbon removal technology, experts
say. While the world has struggled to limit and
reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in recent
decades, several companies have instead focussed
on developing technology to remove CO2 from the
atmosphere.
A group of least developed countries and
small island states have joined forced with
researchers to better support communities recover
from climate damages. Nepal, Bangladesh, Senegal,
Malawi, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Tonga and
Vanuatu are exploring setting up national
facilities to channel resources for climate
disasters response and disburse money where it is
most needed. The initiative will help communities
inform governments on how to respond to future
climate shocks from a local perspective. The
alliance is being supported
by the International Centre for Climate Change and
Development (ICCCAD) in Bangladesh, and the
International Institute for Environment and
Development (IIED) in the
UK. | | |
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