“Rebuilding Better: Decarbonizing Homes in Ukraine”
photo: Dmytro Tolokonov
The online resource FORESIGHT Climate & Energy published an article by journalist Kira Taylor with comments by Svyatoslav Pavliuk, Executive Director of the EECU.
The topic of the article is “Rebuilding Better: Decarbonizing Homes in Ukraine”. The author highlights the problem of rebuilding Ukraine from the perspective of short-term and long-term planning and explains the challenges of each of these processes.
The beginning of the article is quite understandable and sometimes even primitive for a Ukrainian reader, but for a foreign audience, it demonstrates in detail the points at which the reconstruction of Ukrainian cities is a difficult and financially costly process.
In particular, the author talks about the old Soviet housing stock, which occupies almost half of the entire housing stock and is therefore inefficient, the unmodernized central heating system, the dependence of buildings on fossil fuels, and the difference between apartment buildings in cities and private households in rural areas. At the same time, all of these problems are superimposed on the lack of a secure environment, which makes it difficult to attract investment and develop long-term solutions.
Ukrainian readers may be interested in the last two subsections of the article: “Decarbonization of the housing stock” and ‘Financial barriers’. In these sections, interviewed experts express their views on Ukraine's energy transition, which we need in order to join the EU. Only financial and security factors stand in the way.