Facing climate change issues in Belgium
Climate change is an issue with golabl concern. A lot of governments around the world have already taken some measures to prevent it, but still none of them has found the ‘ideal solution’. A few days ago the Flemish government signed a Climate and Energy Pact to reduce the pollution in the years to come.
In order to understand a little bit better the environmental policies in Belgium, Anton Van Spaendonk and Kevin Crahaij, master students in Law focused on environmetal policies, have given their opinion about this newly signed pact and about the policies that are already stablished in Belgium.
Despite their youth, Anton and Kevin are really concerned about what happens around us. “We have always been. It is our responsability as citizens”, Kevin responds with a serious look on his face. In order to not loose time due to their occupied schedule they carry me into the living room and with a cup of tea we lay all cards on the table: The Climate and Energy Pact, signed a few days earlier by the Flemish government.
This pact has really specific goals, but the main objectives are creating more green areas, reducing emissions and raising the use of sustainable energy. This plan also counts on the support of the citizens and the companies, because they are the big part of the problem. Even though, Anton doesn’t agree with the fact that the people are really concerned about climate change.
“In general everybody is conscious about it, but a lot of people are just focused on their jobs and their dayly life, they have the climate change issue on the background”. Kevin, on the other hand says that “the initiatives of the society and the action goups are helping a lot with the climate change”. Despite this disagreement, they both agree with the fact that the government, since a few years, wasn’t really implicated with the environmental policies. They didn’t give priority to this, and also there was a lack of international co-ordination to fix this problem. They set as an example the Kyoto protocol and how difficult is reaching the aims.
In Belgium, the responsabilities of energy policy are shared among the federal government and the three regions (Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia). Over the last ten years renewable energy has grown until reaching 8% in 2014, but for 2020 the objective is to reach 13%.
Renewable electricity has had a real increase in capacity production due to the growing number of onshore and offshore wind turbines, solar photovoltaic installations and biomass thermal electricity plants. Furthermore, Belgium occupies the fourth place in the European Union in 2015 with the highest wind offshore cumulative power capacity. Moreover, onshore wind development has given rise to a large citizen movement of co-operatives. Despite these figures, Anton and Kevin say that “Belgium, for the moment, can’t affort to leave the fossil fuel consumption, because there is not enough energy power. For instance, Belgium couldn’t survive without its four nuclear plants.”
In fact, Belgium has seven nuclear reactors generating about half of its domestically-generated electricity. The main plants are in Doel and Tihange. The first one opened in 1974 and has been always supported by the government because it is a low cost source of power. But for safety and in order to reach the goals, Belgium has decided to close all nuclear plants and stop depending on nuclear energy by 2025. But recently all the deadlines have been missed or pushed back.
The measures that are into this new Plan also have to be reached by 2020. Between this measures we can find: the construction of 280 extra wind turbines, a switch to low-energy LED systems for the streets lights, a study to investigate road-charching for electric cars, a framework for the flexible storage of energy in batteries at home, banks that will offer cheap loans to allow citizens to invest in sustainable energy…
Almost reaching the end of the interview, our cups of tea already finished, Anton takes a deep breath and says “Belgium is going in the right direction, but there is still a lot of work to do, and it’s going to take years.” Kevin just agrees.
“If national level doesn’t work, it has to be bigger. You see how small is Belgium, this has to be a bigger issue and it has to concern all the countries”.
There is a lot more to say about this topic. A lot to discuss and a lot to learn from them, but the time runs out, and their next appointment is knocking at the door.