Serbia is far behind the world in protecting the environment and natural resources, as well as in the way it produces electricity, energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources, and it should strive for sustainable economic development, which means not only caring for the highest growth rates, but also for the protection of the environment and natural resources, said today expert in engineering economics and sustainable development Petar Djukic.
He told Beta that the percentage of deaths and illnesses in Serbia is up to 50 percent higher than in the world as a result of environmental pollution, especially unhealthy air.
“Polluted air means contaminated soil, unhealthy food, untreated water, the accumulation of unused waste, so it can be said that the environmental problem in Serbia is dramatic”, Djukic said.
He added that such a state of environmental pollution is influenced by several factors, the first being the lack of financial resources for investment in protection, then rather weak and irresponsible institutions, the current structure of political power, as well as the lack of a proper environmental culture.
“The environmental awareness of a large part of the citizens is rapidly changing for the better, as it is now in Serbia, but as a rule, when it comes to nails”, Djukic said.
An elementary premise of a sustainable environmental protection system, he said, is compliance with the law and appropriate enforceable strategies, the deliberate use of “green” resources and a higher level of environmental awareness and responsibility.
According to him, there are many old cars in Serbia today that do not even have a catalytic converter to remove dangerous sulfur and nitrogen oxides and lead, while diesel vehicles and even internal combustion engines are being thrown out of the world. Hazardous gases are emitted into the atmosphere, he said, and the burning of fossil fuels in large and individual combustion plants and the use of lignite in thermal power plants, which are among the dirtiest in Europe, both because of poor fuel and the lack of modern technologies for its purification.
“It has almost been announced that Power Plants of the Electric Power Industry of Serbia (EPS) represents half of the largest pollutants in Europe, which may lead to the erroneous conclusion that Serbia contributes 50 percent to Europe’s pollution, which is by no means true. Carbon dioxide emissions in Serbia per capital it is the highest in our region after Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), but far behind in terms of emissions per EU average”, Djukic said.
He added that “nevertheless, industrial plants in Serbia, especially the Kostolac, Kolubara thermal power plants, and even Nikola Tesla, are, according to the concentration of different pollutants, among the ten individually the largest pollutants in Europe”.
He pointed out that if all social (environmental and deferred) costs were taken into account, electricity production “would be far more expensive, as it would have to be at least 30 percent higher for households as well”.
“It is a difficult endeavor that would only bring many savings and far higher energy efficiency in the medium to long term. Rationalization and more efficient use of heat would bring enormous savings in thermal energy, including cleaner cities”, Djukic said.
Serbia also uses cheap Ural oil, which is full of sulfur and nitrogen compounds, and the state fails to control the emissions of such gases in large industrial plants, so for example, at RTB Bor, a new investor intensified production by treating hazardous sulfur compounds in a newly constructed smelter that lacks adequate capacity. He pointed out that in Serbia ash from thermal power plants covered 1.8 thousand hectares of arable land because six to seven million tonnes are produced annually, and as many as 11 thousand hectares of potentially fertile agricultural soil are produced under surface mines.
The problem, he said, is that fees for exploiting natural resources are not levied, but in inadequate value and now there is no way to align them with the “polluter pays” principle, without which there is no sustainable development.
“Companies extracting natural resources as coal should pay purposefully into the ‘green fund’ three percent of the value of the extracted coal or seven percent of the value of the extracted oil or gas, but the Oil Industry of Serbia (NIS), which is majority owned by Russia’s Gasprom, pays one percent”, Djukic said.
These funds, along with all the costs of pollution and other environmental expenditures, he said, should serve to remediate the pollution, as well as the consequences of exploitation of natural resources and should reach up to four to five percent of gross domestic product (GDP), which means in Serbia, they are close to two billion euros, and they are not even close to that, since the possibility is given for companies to calculate their own fees and to pay fees on their own records and will.
“All this has contributed to the poor quality of the environment in which we live, and the payment account is long overdue, but it was not as obvious as it is now”, adding that it was a fortunate circumstance that environmental awareness was advanced today, mostly due to global exchange information and environmental cultures in the world”, Djukic said for Beta.
