Focusing on Value and Sustainability : Matt Jimenez interview

Big hydropower plants are an important source of clean and cheap electricity for many countries in Southeast Asia. However, dams harm the environment and have dire consequences on local communities. Building more dams would therefore pose major trade-offs between electricity supply and environmental protection.  A team of scientists based in Singapore showed that these two challenges can be decoupled. Their study, titled “Solar energy and regional coordination as a feasible alternative to large hydropower in Southeast Asia,” recently published in Nature Communications, showed that there are more sustainable pathways to a clean energy future (refer to figure below).

The European Compost Network welcomes the positive vote of the ENVI Committee on its own initiative report on the New Circular Economy Action Plan. The ECN supports the report’s recommendations help agriculture farmers to replace mineral fertilizers with organic soil improvers such as compost and digestate and save organics in soil.
“We have to create a level playing field” said MEP Jan Huitema Rapporteur of the ENVI Committee “or we even have to give a plus to secondary raw materials so to reward their use”. The circular economy is not only a key model to protect the environment and reduce pollution of air, water and soil. It also allows countries to be less dependent on imports of raw materials and it reduces the huge greenhouse gas emissions associated with their mining and shipping.
An own-initiative report of the European Parliament is not legally binding but is a very useful indicator of the European Parliament’s priorities and concerns and it contains official calls on the European Commission to take action. In February (08/02), the European Parliament Plenary will vote on the report adopted last week by the ENVI Committee.
Read the full article at: www.compostnetwork.info