UN Bans Bulgaria from Trading with Carbon Quotas

Bulgaria's Environment Minister Nona Karadzhavo admitted the government knew since September 209 that the country might be banned from carbon trading. Photo by BGNES

The United Nations is going to prohibit Bulgaria from trading with greenhouse gas quotas, Environment Minister Nona Karadzhova has announced.

Speaking at a forum in Sofia Thursday, Karadzhova said a UN report under the Framework Convention on Climate Change has exposed “devastating” flaws of Bulgaria’s National System for Evaluation of the Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

The Environment Minister blamed the problems on the inactivity on part of her predecessor, Dzhevdet Chakarov.

She said the draft decision of the UN to ban Bulgaria from carbon trading will most likely be confirmed on June 30, 2010. Bulgaria is entitled to ask for a new permission for carbon trading accreditation in mid September at the earliest, and might receive it as early as November 2010, if the respective issues have been rectified by then.

Bulgaria’s government of the GERB party was aware of the possibility that the country’s accreditation for carbon trading might be revoke when it first received the “devastating” report in September 2009. It has notified the major businesses but the Environment Ministry decided not to make it public until the spring of the following year hoping to be able to fix the issues in the meantime, admitted Minister Karadzhova.

“Even thought the UN has recognized a great improvement of the work of Bulgaria’s new greenhouse emissions system, the decision for revoking the country’s accreditation is based on the report from September, and there is no way it can be avoided,” she said while expressing her hopes that the accreditation could be restored in the fall.

The announcement of the Environment Ministry that Bulgarian will not be able to benefit from carbon trade comes a couple of weeks after the European Commission approved the long-delayed and troubled carbon dioxide plan of the country, paving the way for 132 Bulgarian industrial plants to raise cash by selling their quotas.

The Bulgarian government will also be unable to trade with its own quotas, said the Minister. The state has about 200 million tones of carbon emissions, and it was hoping to sell BGN 40 million of those by the end of the year to raise badly needed cash that it planned to put into green and energy efficiency investments.

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