In Serbia, the Low Carbon Development Strategy was adopted at the beginning of the month, five years after it was written. Experts on climate change assess that it is „obsolete“, because in the meantime it turned out that the fight against global warming must be more serious.
As Klima 101 reports, it is a key umbrella document that should define, frame and organize domestic climate policies in the coming years, even decades.
The draft of this strategy was completed back in 2018, but its adoption was delayed for years, which was already the subject of criticism and research.
“The strategy is an important document, and its adoption is good news. However, one cannot avoid the fact that it was written before the pandemic, before the war in Ukraine, before major changes in energy policies around the world. The world is completely different today,” says Aleksandar Jovović, a professor at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Belgrade and one of the leading domestic experts in the field of climate policies.
The text of the adopted strategy is almost identical to the one that was first presented to the public in 2019. Its key part is three potential scenarios that predict and plan mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions until 2030 and 2050, where a reduction of emissions of 33.3 percent compared to 1990, until 2030, is set as a minimum.
The adoption of the strategy broke both international and domestic deadlines
The adoption of such a strategy is provided for in the text of the Paris Agreement from 2015, which was ratified by Serbia in 2017. It is one of the basic documents that is the obligation of every signatory state of the agreement, and which should define the roles of individual states in the large international project to suppress greenhouse gas emissions. Gardens.
The exception is the European Union, which adopted its strategy at the level of the Union, and it applies to all member states.
It is a key document not only in terms of reducing emissions, but also in general for the future of Serbia and its economic development in a world that is rapidly turning to the green transition, in a process that many call a new industrial revolution.
What happened in the past five years from the writing of the Strategy to its adoption:
The three warmest years since measurements have been made in Serbia (2018, 2019 and 2022)
All major economies and almost half of the world’s countries have adopted plans to reach net-zero emissions
The beginning and end of the COVID-19 pandemic
The beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2022
EU adopted “Green Deal” (2020) and “Industrial Plan” (2022)
Drop in solar panel prices by about 37 percent (until 2021)
“The Government of Serbia has not only broken the deadlines from the Paris Agreement, but also from its own legislation,” explains Danijela Božanić, a meteorologist who has participated in numerous UN summits.
“The Law on Climate Change, adopted by the Government in 2021, set a deadline for the adoption of the Strategy, which itself expired at the beginning of April this year. So, after breaking through its own deadline of two years, an outdated document was eventually adopted, which was largely prepared.”
There was a lack of understanding and lack of interest on the part of the top government to seriously deal with the problem of climate change.
If there’s one takeaway from this whole story, it’s that reducing emissions is an incredibly complex thing. A strategy is a document that plans the reorientation of almost the entire society.
In the strategy, the scenarios are defined, then the indicators used to evaluate the scenarios, then the measures used to achieve them, the consequences of those measures, and the costs and resources necessary for their implementation.
Dozens of planned measures include everything from the construction of new power plants based on renewable sources to changes in livestock nutrition, the strategy then assesses the capacities for their implementation, their impact on GDP, employment, the environment, their costs and effects.
In fact, the reason why the strategy was finally adopted in the form in which it was adopted is hidden in that gigantic calculation.
“It is complex mathematics, an equation with dozens of variables. It is not done by one person, but by teams of experts using top-notch software. Even in our most ambitious plans, the use of coal in Serbia was not at zero in 2050, although the reduction in that sector is about 90 percent,” explains Aleksandar Jovović.
By the way, Serbia gets most of the electricity it consumes, and lately it exports again, by burning low-caloric lignite, which New Economy has already written about.
The development of the strategy was part of a special project financed by the EU through pre-accession funds, and both domestic and international experts participated in it, with the use of specially designed software.
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