The Rīga city capital company "Rīga Forests" manages 62,000 hectares of forest, and Anita Skudra, chairwoman of the company's board of directors, said that two projects are currently in the approval stage that will help achieve climate neutrality goals.
One involves "the clean-up or restoration of degraded peat bog areas, as degraded peat areas are the source of significant amounts of CO2", Skudra said.
"The other issue is, of course, solar energy, which we are also thinking about a lot. Of course, we cooperate with scientists from all over the world and from Europe, and here too we have projects that we are working on, for example with the European Investment Bank or with large European organizations," said Skudra.
The first step for every company is to assess its environmental impact, said Jānis Brizga, Chairman of the Board of the environmental protection and education organization "Green Freedom".
"If we look at a national level, the most difficult things we have had to do in the last decades are transport and agricultural land use," said Brizga.
"And in energy, we are also heating our homes more and switching to renewables, away from fossil fuels. But of course, it is not always so easy for a company to switch from gas to something renewable. It requires investment, it requires some infrastructure issues, maybe some things that should be supported at the national level," Brizga said.
It is the lack of funding and a well-developed strategy for investing in investment projects that poses the biggest challenges for municipal capital companies, said Andra Feldmane, business advisor at the Latvian Association of Local Governments.
"We have adopted regulations and directives, but there is no funding, which means that this is the last moment when we should figure out how we are going to do something," said the representative of local governments.
Andra Feldmane said that Latvian municipalities have attracted both grants and loans from the European Union's Recovery and Resilience Mechanism, but these funds are loans from the European Commission on the financial markets, which means that this money will have to be repaid through the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.
"Take heating. If the heating is not as green as the legislation says it should be, then at least 25% will go to the European Commission, which we think is a pretty important signal. We need to look very carefully to ensure that in 2030 we do not have a situation where we have high CO2 charges in several sectors, which will be passed on to our consumers, to our citizens," said Andra Feldmane.
Jānis Brizga said that the environmental impact and supply chains are now more on the minds of large companies.
"Banks are also increasingly asking companies - if you want to get a loan you need to determine how green the company is, they are asking for an assessment of carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas emissions. And that, of course, motivates many companies. We have to work with our suppliers and with our customers on these emissions," Brizga said.
There is not much time to put all these complicated things in place. For example, Riga and Liepaja are among the 100 EU cities that have committed to becoming climate-neutral by 2030, so only five years to go.
