China-backed coal projects prompt climate change fears www.bbc.com

As levels of greenhouse gases reach a new record, concerns are growing about the role of China in global warming.

For years, the increase in the number of Chinese coal-fired power stations has been criticised.

Now environmental groups say China is also backing dozens of coal projects far beyond its borders.

Coal is the most damaging of the fossil fuels because of the quantity of carbon dioxide it releases when it's burned.

Last year, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached its highest level for the past 3-5 million years, according to the latest research by the UN's weather agency, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

And last month the UN's climate science panel said that coal must be phased out by 2050 if the world is to have any chance of limiting the rise in temperatures.

The Chinese-supported coal projects are under way or planned as far afield as South America, Africa, southeast Asia and the Balkans.

Contracts and financing for these facilities are often not fully transparent but campaign groups including Bankwatch have tried to keep track.

"You cannot be a world leader in curbing air pollution and at the same time the world's biggest financier of overseas coal power plants," the group's energy coordinator Ioana Ciuta told the BBC.

According to Ms Ciuta, efforts to tackle the dirty air of Chinese cities have led many power companies to limit their ambitions for coal-fired power stations in China itself and to target their technology and labour overseas instead.

"By having China invest in over 60 countries along the Belt and Road Initiative, it's perpetuating a source of pollution that has been demonstrated to be harmful not just to the climate but also to economies," she said.

No carbon capture
In Serbia, one of the country's largest coal-fired power stations is being expanded with the help of a loan from a Chinese bank and with the work being led by one of China's largest construction companies.

An hour's drive east of the capital Belgrade, in the coal-rich Danube valley, construction has already started at the site, known as Kostolac B3.

An existing power station towers over the rolling landscape, a steady stream of pollution twisting from a massive smokestack, and conveyor belts ferry coal from a nearby open-cast mine at Drmno.

The power station is run by the national Serbian electricity company, EPS, which provides about 70% of the country's power by burning coal - the rest comes from hydro-electric schemes.

Now, under a $715m (£560m) contract agreed by the Serbian government and Chinese President Xi Jinping, an extra unit is being added, which will bring 350MW of additional capacity with the latest "super-critical" technology.

When we visit, we catch a brief glimpse of a group of Chinese workers wearing hard hats on their way from the construction site to a vast set of accommodation blocks - by next year, some 1,500 Chinese staff will be here.

Safety signs and notice boards are written in Serbian and Chinese. Equipment and shipping containers carry Chinese labels.

I ask the EPS official running the project, Zeljko Lazovic, what he feels about such a large and important venture being in the hands of Chinese engineers and workers.

"In the next few months a lot of Chinese will come here and this will be a big challenge," he says.

"With Chinese workers and Serbian workers, at the beginning we had some cultural problems but we have overcome them and there is now very good cooperation."

Efforts to tackle pollution in Chinese cities such as Beijing have pushed Chinese power companies to look overseas
When asked about the environmental cost of the new project, Mr Lazovic insisted it would meet all the EU's standards on pollution by dust, nitrogen dioxide and sulphur.

However, the new unit will not be fitted with any carbon capture technology so it will fit into a pattern of Chinese-backed projects that will add to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

'Locked into high emissions'
Christine Shearer is an analyst with the group CoalSwarm, which tracks coal developments, and she is scathing about the implications.

"These projects are not compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C or 2C," she said, referring to the two targets of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

She says that Chinese financial institutions are filling a gap left by Western banks and agencies deciding to limit their involvement in coal.

"These projects, if completed, will lock the countries into high carbon-emitting infrastructure and volatile coal imports precisely at a time when prices for clean energy are starting to fall below that of coal power."

We tried to contact the Export-Import Bank of China, which is providing the loan, and the China Machinery Engineering Corporation, which is leading the construction, but did not hear back.

For the Serbian power company, EPS, the attraction of a local supply of coal has combined with a cheap Chinese loan and the prospects of valuable exports of electricity.

Respiratory diseases
About 3,500 jobs depend on the Kostolac complex but some local people have become increasingly outspoken about the pollution in the area.

Momir Savic showed me how the conveyor belts carrying coal run close to the villages and he fears a further expansion of the operation.

"The quality of our air and water is very poor. We cannot grow fruit and vegetables. There is also a lot of noise. All this affects the health of people living here, many of whom have respiratory diseases," he said.

EPS says it is spending hundreds of millions of euros on environmental protection but its track record clearly does not inspire trust.

Pera Markovic, a lawyer with Cekor, an environmental group, is critical of the company's failure to limit pollution in the local area.

But he concedes that Serbia is heavily dependent on coal for its power.

For how long? "Decades," Mr Markovic says.

That's likely to be the same in many other countries too, whatever climate scientists say is needed.

Mongolia’s developing air ambulance service www.news.mn

Helicopter landing sites (HLS) are being constructed outside three big hospitals in the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar with the aim of developing the air ambulance service. Recently, the National Centre for Communicable Diseases has become able to receive medical helicopters with the construction of an HLS. A 11728 square meters site consisting of the HLS, a car park with a capacity of 194 vehicles, 2580 meters of pavements, 125 street lights, 104 seats and 41 rubbish bins has been constructed.

Gazprom stops auction as it’s ‘sold out’ for 2018 www.rt.com

Gazprom Export, the export arm of Russian gas giant Gazprom, has stopped the natural gas auctions on its electronic sales platform because all natural gas available until the end of 2018 has already been sold.
Gazprom Export launched on August 17 its Electronic Sales Platform (ESP) for physical natural gas sales to European consumers, in addition to supplies under existing contracts. The Russian firm expects the platform “to become an additional mean to optimize supplies of gas,” Elena Burmistrova, Director General of Gazprom Export, said.

8.7 million livestock to winter in transhumance www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. According to the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Light Industry, preparation for winter has been done by a total of 169.7 thousand herder families, that own over 68 million livestock, while another 8.7 million are to spend the winter and spring in transhumance.

Yuhan-Kimberly assists reforestation in Mongolia www.koreaherald.com

Yuhan-Kimberly, a South Korean manufacturer of sanitary products, said it was joining forces with the Mongolian government to restore a forest and open an observatory tower there.

IMF suggests tighter monetary conditions www.zgm.mn

An International Monetary fund (IMf) staff team led by Geoff Gottlieb has visited Ulaanbaatar to conduct discussions on the sixth review of the three-year extended fund facility (eff) arrangement. The team highlighted the widening current account deficit and suggested the central bank to rein in high credit growth.“As we reach the mid-way point of the IMfsupported program, significant progress has been made by the authorities in overcoming the economic crisis. Growth has revived to over 6 percent, the overall fiscal balance has swung from a large deficit to a small surplus, and government debt has fallen sharply. While the external environment has been supportive with buoyant export demand, the recovery has become broader based with consumption and investment rising sharply.

Mongolia: small embassies can have a big impact www.blogs.fco.gov.uk

By:Catherine Arnold Former British Ambassador to Mongolia
Part of BBC Inside the Foreign Office 2018 UK in Mongolia

Mongolia is everything you expect. Mongolia is also everything you don’t expect. At least that’s what I found as the UK’s Ambassador. The world’s least densely populated country, which was once one of the largest empires in world history, it is a land of immense beauty and rich history.

Mongolia is also a vibrant 21st century democracy. Many issues that matter to Mongolia, matter to us – media freedom, climate change, global peacekeeping. And, it’s quite literally sitting on a gold mine. Home to over 6000 deposits of more than 80 different minerals, Mongolia has the potential to be the richest country per capita in the world.

That means the small, motivated embassy of three UK diplomats and our excellent Mongolian team, covers a huge range of work.

The UK and Mongolia have recently celebrated 55 years of diplomatic relations and, as Mongolia’s second largest trading partner, our trading relationship matters for both countries. To celebrate the 55th anniversary, we announced:

the appointment of Julian Knight MP as the Prime Minister’s Trade Envoy to Mongolia;
that UK Export Finance will increase how much it lends to support suppliers and buyers of UK exports to Mongolia.
Having fretted about meeting our export targets the excellent Department of International Trade team exceeded them.

Cambridge Mask Company’s initial consignment of pollution masks sold out within 24 hrs of the fashion show they were launched at, developing into a thriving collaboration with a Mongolian pharmacy chain.

The mask fashion show also means more people have started to wear effective masks – of whatever brand. The embassy has since taken this to the next level, focussing on supporting the poorer parts of Ulaanbaatar, where pollution levels often go off the international air-quality scale.

This is typical of our work in Mongolia – supporting UK trade is of course an essential part of what diplomats do around the world but the relationship between our two countries is about so much more than that.

We work with Mongolia in the UN Human Rights Council, Mongolian troops joined coalitions with ours in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Mongolian peacekeepers are currently working across Africa. UK expertise is supporting education reform and a UK funded mobile app and training for border guards is helping to counter the illegal wildlife trade (IWT) here.

The last had swift, positive results, including a 25-fold increase in detection of smuggled, endangered wolf-parts. The Mongolian Foreign Minister spoke powerfully about this at the recent major international conference on IWT, in London.

It’s true that supporting UK trade is important work for diplomats around the world and small embassies can have a big impact. The British Embassy Ulaanbaatar has helped UK companies in Mongolia to secure exports worth many times the total running and staff costs of our embassy.

But diplomacy works best when trade is one of many links between the UK and the countries we work in. A key task for diplomats is to fit together the people and pieces to make the UK’s presence overseas much more than the sum of its separate parts.

Mongolia's economy to maintain positive growth next year www.xinhuanet.com

ULAN BATOR, Nov. 22 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia's economic growth has been recovering rapidly thanks to the recovery of commodity prices in the global market and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)'s economic bail-out program for the country, a Mongolian economic researcher said.

Russian Foundation for Basic Research to partner in research field www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. In the frameworks of her official visit to the Russian Federation, Minister of Education, Culture, Science and Culture Ts.Tsogzolmaa held a meeting with the President of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research V.Ya.Panchenko.

Three financial instruments to launch in capital market www.zgm.mn

Minj Property LLC, which is organizing its roadshow for a bond offering today, is planning on becoming a publicly traded firm. Along with the company, Ard Credit and Tumen Shuvuut have announced potential IPOs in upcoming months. Minj Property LLC is a construction firm that has implemented Park Town-1 project for 620 households in Darkhan-Uul aimag. A study that involved 600 households in need of accommodation in Darkhan city shows that 22 percent of surveyee are planning on purchasing new housing in the short-term. Because of the fact that 91 percent of accommodation in the city were constructed in 1990s, the demand for new housing stands high in Darkhan city. The province has over 100,000 population, of which working-age population account for 64 percent.