Sunday, 7 September 2008

The Flemish Climate Policy

In Belgium, we have three official languages and this has a lot of implications for politics. The federal government is quite weak for the governements of the different language communities have gained ever more power during the last 30 years.

The result is that the Flemish community (my part) is also having it's own local climate-policy. The 2006-2012 plan can be found here (in English).

A march 2007 evalution of this plan can be found here (Dutch only). It gives a nice overview of the different (often very small) actions the government wants to take to reduce emissions. A december 2007 follow up can be found here

Flanders of course does look further than 2012 : A technical study (in Dutch) (the economical still to follow) to be used as a science-based realistic starting ground to develop a post-2012 scenario. The study, making prognosis until 2020 & 2030) uses 5 BAU-scenario's, differing in economic growth, energy prices & CO2-prices.

The spreading in CO2 emissions of course differs per scenario : a 5% difference by 2020, but a 16% difference between different scenarios by 2030.

In Flanders, at the moment already we have a CO2-trading market which controls emissions. The 2008-2012 plan can be found here (Dutch only !) Towards the end of the file you can see the emission rights PER COMPANY, which i think is pretty cool.

I have the feeling the main conclusion of Flemish politics on climate change is a lot of good will, but a lack of ambition. Wich actually defines the flemish people :-)


  1. Sorry about going off topic here, but I thought there were only two official languages, and two groups -- Flems and Walloons, speaking Dutch and French (possibly not in that order). What is the third language/group?

    While I'm off-topic, a different off-topicality. I've been fooling around some with genealogy. It seems that I may have some Belgian, or Dutch, or both, ancestors from the 1600s. Could you mention some English-language histories of the area that would discuss 1500-1750 history fairly well?

    You can send as email to me at plutarchspam at aim dot com.

  2. After WW1, Belgium wanted a border which would be easier to defend and therefore annexated a small part of Germany. As a result now there's a small (some 70.000 people) German population in the East of Belgium.

    You can find a good explanation on wikipedia : Communities, regions and language areas of Belgium

    To make it even more complicated, in the very south near the border with Luxembourg, people still use a local German dialect called 'Letzeburgisch' of which some people claim it's an independent language. And which in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg actaully has official status, which implies tiny Luxembourg also is trilingual.

    And which implies Belgium, sort of, is quatro-lingual. Welcome in Europe :-)

    It does happen frequently Belgian people, in order to be able to communicate with each other, make use of the English language. I kid you not.

    For your other question, i've mailed an historian i know, but I am awaiting his answer and will mail you afterwards.

  3. Apparently, THE standard work is the history of the low countries, even though my contact says the book is biased sometimes (he didn't mention how or why); yet mainly for the post-French revolution period.

    A big thank you to Lombas for the quick answer !