Prague, Jan 16 (CTK) – The Czech cabinet passed on Monday an action plan of the country’s adaptation to the climate change that helps cope with draught and floods and also protect forests and water sources, Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka (Social Democrats, CSSD) has written on Twitter.
“We continue TO prepare our country for serious climate changes,” he wrote, referring to the strategic document completed by the Environment Ministry.
The measures will cost over one billion crowns.
The document defines 50 priority steps including 160 most important tasks. For the tasks to be met, money must be redistributed among ministries or added from the state budget.
Up to 834 million crowns is to go to the number one priorities, or the crucial ones, by 2020.
Further 415 million would go to complementary measures.
The ministry writes in an accompanying report that some 140 experts from the public, private and academic sectors assisted in completing the plan.
Opposition TOP 09 lawmaker and environmental expert Michal Kucera criticised the plan for insufficiently emphasising energy saving and efficiency.
As a result of such emphasis, the state’s support for industry would switch from assembly plants, based on cheap labour, towards more sophisticated branches and companies, such as the the area of automatisation of buildings, Kucera said.
In addition, energy saving is one of the easiest achievable and most efficient measures of climate protection, he added.
The plan deals, for example, with ways to prepare forests for climate changes, such as the reduction of white-tailed deer that excessively liquidates trees and bushes in some areas, a reduction of spruces’ domination of forests and the revitalisation of wetlands and natural water streams.
