The minister of the environment, Diana Buzoianu, claims that audits are necessary on the authorities that, on the environmental component, have failed to attract more than half of the financing for the projects carried out through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).
"In the coming period, we need to carry out audits on all the authorities that have failed to attract, the way I see it, more than 50% of the funds. (...) I will give you an example in the afforestation area: today, there are 9,000 hectares achieved, and the penalty is over 150 million if we do not reach the target of 26,000 hectares," said Buzoianu.
According to the minister, there must follow an analysis to identify the blockages facing the authorities with problems in making investments from the PNRR.
"Each of the authorities has faced different types of problems. We need to see what the bottlenecks were, especially in the context of the floods we have had in recent years. (...) We had a huge opportunity, through the PNRR, to access the money, to be able to protect Romanians from floods, and there is, from my point of view, no excuse for not making these investments for two years," said Diana Buzoianu.
The data presented by the minister show that, on the water management component, there is a risk of sanctions against Romania for not fully implementing projects with funds from the PNRR, such as Investment 1 - the expansion of water and sewage systems in agglomerations larger than 2,000 inhabitants (penalty of maximum 284 million euros).
At the same time, in what concerns the investments that were supposed to be carried out by the National Administration "Romanian Waters" (ANAR) for critical infrastructure against floods, not a single kilometre of the 13 dams in the plan has been built, and out of a total of 13 polders, only one is "in an advanced physical stage."
Regarding Investment 7, referring to the expansion of the national observation network within the National Integrated Meteorological System, 300 automatic and autonomous surface meteorological stations and one hundred agrometeorological stations should have been purchased. "For this investment, we had 40 million euros available. Today, there is no meteorological station or agrometeorological station that is implemented for this indicator. (...) Romania risks a penalty of 142 million euros here," Buzoianu emphasised.
Regarding the sub-investment having to do with the production capacity of energy from renewable sources, the plan was to establish and operationalise five biogas production systems. According to official data, currently, five contracts have been signed for the implementation of these systems.
Also, in the area of digital transformation, there is an investment whose main objective was digitalisation in the field of the environment, with an allocation of 52 million euros, and for the establishment and operationalisation of the system for combating illegal logging, the budget is 46 million, with a physical progress of 60%. In addition, the physical progress for completing the digitalisation of 32 public environmental services is 75%.
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